skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I support a 72-hour public review period, I think there are ways to exploit public interest that would render it less effective. However, a 72-hour review period coupled with rules against omnibus laws would be very efficient (IMO). The laws that reach the floor would be very specific. Congressional records could not be obfuscated with "well I wanted this, so I compromised and voted for that as well".

Although...I think congress would still find a way around such rules.
" "One day I hope Joel eventually realizes this. Programmers who say they don’t have time to write tests are living in the stone age."

This kind of attitude really pisses me off. "

Then you'll really love "Uncle" Bob's latest blog entry (http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/06/echoes-from...) where he re iterates his inane "Stone Age Programmer" name calling. The comments on the blog post are more interesting (well ok, funnier) than the content of the post.
I was fortunate that, when I was of school age, I absolutely adored standardized tests. Something about them tickled a compulsive, pattern-recognition part of my brain, linked to delight.

I scored extremely well.

Recently, however, I find that taking multiple-guess tests or evaluations seems much more like the waste of time that it is. I still get some pleasure from a few questions, but, like Mr. Owl, I get bored after 3 licks.

Not all gifted students are good at standardized tests, possibly because they can't be bothered to care enough to pay attention to something so trivially easy.

All that said, I think the student in the OP is foolish for trying to insist he have the experience of being a part of a system while, at the same time, receiving exceptional treatment from that same system. Any stifling is self-inflicted.
The one being discussed is "criminal intent". It's an admittedly fuzzy term, but clearly if you're murdering someone, you have criminal intent regardless of your knowledge of whether it is illegal.

Well... mostly clearly. Clearly enough in the murder case, but there's certainly fuzzy cases. Still, there are an awful lot of crimes on the book that when you lack criminal intent, it doesn't actually make sense to prosecute from either a "rehabilitation" or "punishment" point of view, such as the ones in the article. What did society gain by any useful metric in the orchid case? In fact it lost a lot for no good reason.
methanol based fuel cell charging is uber cool, 320 hour backup time is impressive.

but would airlines allow people to have liquid methanol for charging during vacations, need to be though about before taking it into production
It would be nice - but I tend to be more cynical when it comes to BIG-CORP against the little guy.

I think the illegal EULA clauses have been struck down because you can't see them until you have opened the box and agreed to them - which is obviously illegal.
As long as Autodesk's new clause that you can't sell on an item was clearly stated in advance then it might be considered as reasonable as you being told by a store that eg. earings are non-returnable for hygiene reasons.

For example the laws in the eu which give you a right to return any item bought online (for any reason) already have exemptions for digital media on the grounds you could copy them and return the originals.

Ironicaly for Autoesk back in the days when they used donges this wouldn't have been a problem - they always claimed that the dongle wasn't replaceable and you should insure it for the cost of the software - creating a precedent that it had value and could be bought and sold.
Damn, what a powerful search tool 80Legs has. Very effective, especially for the money. Thanks for the help, guys.
A new method predicts dropping out of university
What's with all of the sensationalist titles recently? I'm starting to learn to avoid any article whose title sounds like "the death of," "the most amazing," "the end of", "x is the new y," "the biggest," "the _____ your business will fail without," and so forth. It's patronizing and offensive. Thank you, but I will decide for myself exactly how bombastic your content is. The revelation that buying ads next to spammers makes your business seem less legitimate is not the "death" of anything except the 2 minutes I spent reading it.
I'm tired of meta-comments. I'd rather discuss the link. I down vote all meta-comments.
"Autodesk argued that if the judge decided that people own its software, prices will rise for end users." That's a software economics argument I had never seen. Unfortunate they don't elaborate on the foundations.
Why are all the comments mentioning picking the back of the lock now [dead]?
> What you're saying is you don't want to make a concrete decision and you want options to be open to you.

No, what I'm saying is I want to be able to make my own decision regardless of people trying to make it seem as if the one or the other side is 'evil'.

I've long ago decided the world of closed source is no longer mine. But that doesn't stop me from having respect for those that try to change the closed source world from the inside, and it doesn't stop me from having respect for those that try to keep it alive.

I just don't agree with them.

> It's a war between many businesses, non-profits, users, developers, etc. Do you want to be stuck with Microsoft Windows everywhere? Or Intel's x86 hardware everywhere? Intel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will all do what they can to kill the competition.

Possibly. But that does not mean I'm going to have to stoop to their tactics in order to make my points. The last time I wrote software for or explicitly supported closed source platforms is very long ago.

> Yes there is. One idea is opposed to the other. How can there not be polarization?

Because there is a lot of gray stuff in between. Closed source software that ends up being open sourced. People working for closed source companies writing open source in their spare time using company resources (with approval), closed source companies donating money, equipment, programmers and other resources to open source project and so on. Dual license software, etc. To polarize means that the issues are black and white. They're not.

> This is actually Stallman's point, and it was also the open source movement's point. Code is not enough. There is also the discussion of freedom or the discussion of marketing.

So, let's do it. Let's not attack people on the other side of the imaginary divide, if it even exists. The best way to make sure that Microsoft and company are irrelevant is to make their software irrelevant. To literally outcode them. Once that's done, there is really no fighting with free.
The Zen of “Go Away” Rates
As far as I know, I was allowed to skip 7th grade math and science simply because my parents asked for it. If I recall correctly, it was a simple request. (I don't know what led up to it exactly, but I didn't miss anything -- those classes were pre-algebra and (I think) earth science), which are redundant with earlier/later courses.)
While I like the app and what you're trying to do, just a heads up that you're going to come across as super shady by automatically following the @glu Twitter account when you have users login with their Twitter credentials. The problem is that you're not making it clear up front that by logging in, you're going to be adding a follower to their Twitter account, which will be interpreted as a violation of their privacy, and will almost certainly cause a backlash at some point.

I understand that in order for your app to work, the user has to be following the @glu account, but automatically opt-ing someone in is not the right way to do it. You need to update the content and design to make it painfully clear to anyone logging into your site that they are also consenting to following the @glu account.
"Real" is relative. It might be "real" for a set of a hundred images but it might seriously bog-down or spit-out garbage if you tried to implement it for ten thousand, never mind ten million.

Image processing is full of things that sort-of work, that are impressive but not fully reliable.
If social engineering taught me anything it is not only could I spent 15 minutes at the lock, but I could even print this out and tape it to the wall in front of me. I forgot my lock combo and am trying to recover it, thats all. Someone might even come over and help :)
Doesn't Twisted have a lot of crusty, poorly-documented parts? I remember seeing a lot of old-style classes in Twisted Words.
The Future Of Health Care Is Social
OT: What is the "platform sniffing" going in the the setup.rb file? The installer is trying to determine the Ruby version and the OS platform by using specific known-incompatible features and setting flags based on their success:

http://github.com/tmountain/Liby/blob/c784b187511750f27071e8...

This is how it's done on browsers, sure, outside javascript, it's best to add environment querying functionality and basic introspection to the language. Common Lisp has the following functions to do that, among others:

Function LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-TYPE, LISP-IMPLEMENTATION-VERSION
Function SHORT-SITE-NAME, LONG-SITE-NAME
Function MACHINE-INSTANCE (hostname)
Function MACHINE-TYPE (processor architecture)
Function MACHINE-VERSION (processor version)
Function SOFTWARE-TYPE, SOFTWARE-VERSION (OS name, and type)
Function USER-HOMEDIR-PATHNAME

Don't re-implement Lisp in Ruby. Clone and copy Lisp's features for your favorite language, so you don't have to emulate ./configure in a far richer environment; automake is poverty.

A few days ago I told the polite crowd in #ruby how I felt about the irb ruby shell. That too is lacking and there is tremendous room for improvement. Start by implementing value registers; in CL, * (star) contains the value of the last expression evaluated; (star)(star) the one before that, and (star)(star)(star) the one after the last. They come handy because you don't need to build complex binding LETs, and you don't have to pollute your current namespace creating global variables (naming something, on the spot when you're in the flow is really hard. And a convention is better than everyone inventing a trick)

I had to do (star) because HN ate my #\*s, Paul.
Actually I've been thinking about something like this but didn't want to implement it if no one wanted it - now that I know someone would think it's useful I'll do it. One question though - how would you prefer to get notified? Would retweeting work (might be sensitive info), direct messaging, or maybe email (although you'd have to provide an email address).
The librarian quest for the spear pl - Google Search
"users can pay extra to receive extra status".

oh hello, a one sentence explanation of life hiding in a gaming article.
"world of federal regulations" ?

if you take money from a company and review their products, disclose the conflict of interest. This is fairly simple. Most new bloggers can understand this and most new bloggers aren't going to get paid for writing reviews anyway.

Why do you see this as a problem ?
Similar things happened with a 37signals story a couple weeks back.
Holy smokes, I might have to move to MN when my kids hit school age. I'd heard about how MN was generally more educated and progressive in education than other states, but that's really, really impressive.
You know what's sick? The fact that we slaughter 10 billion sentient, thinking animals in the United States each year. And then we have the nerve to be appalled that a tiny sliver of that suffering is transferred to humans. There are not enough words to describe how misguided we all are.
I know, I meant to be amusing rather than pedantic - left out the :)
You're right, I'll change the language to reflect this. Thanks for the feedback.
Comparisons of stock prices circa 1999 to stock prices 2009 are pretty ridiculous.
My case is more against a homogeneous situation, where everyone you deal with as a peer, on a day to day basis, is of a similar intellectual level.

But you still haven't provided any evidence that such a situation is harmful. (Indeed, you haven't provided any evidence that a person who attends school with young people of advanced abilities doesn't meet every which other kind of people outside of school hours.)

And my response would be that often enough young people with advanced abilities spending substantial time with other young people with advanced abilities is precisely what those young people need to see that NO ONE is "of a similar intellectual level" with many other people in many other domains over a long span of time, but rather each and every person on the planet has a mixture of personal strengths and weaknesses, and many people can develop out of their weaknesses over time.
>>The rule appears to apply to anybody who says anything on Facebook to their friends.

No, it doesn't apply to anyone who isn't getting paid by the company whose products they review.

If you're getting paid to review a product on your facebook page, disclose the fact that you're getting paid. If not, there is nothing to disclose
game developers (who I respect immensely) aren't generally know for doing bug fixing for realtime services (unless they work on a WoW or its ilk).
The funny thing is that the whole, "We've not really sold it to you, you're infringing our copyright if you share it" argument was fought and lost ages ago by book publishers that didn't like having library lending competing with their sales. The subject was well litigated and there is lots of precedence.

I've always been puzzled that the software industry has gotten away with the same line of argument for so long.
Fórum Internacional de Software Livre 10 - Highlights
SMS might be another alternative way for this as well.
Negotiating VC funding? Look beyond ‘the pre’
I don't think so. Pretty sure the best porn sites (assuming that's what you meant) have monthly RPU of like $30ish, and profit margins much lower due to lots of affiliate payouts, high churn, tremendous charge back rates, etc. Their industry, like gambling, is such that RPU is probably a useless metric I suppose.

There are lots of small businesses out there making total assloads of money that you never hear of because they do something like sell truck parts or specialty electronics. They buy their traffic off of Adwords, get ridiculous conversion rates, and average sales of $100+.

Party Poker used to make something like $1,000 per customer. So there'd be a ton of online poker/casino sties perhaps.
A very good question. The same thing happened a little over a week ago, when a moderator deep-sixed all submissions of a particular thirtyseven signals post (sorry, I am avoiding regex bait now).

In fact, it appears that my account which attempted to post the aforementioned story is crippled, which is to say that all comments posted thereafter are auto-killed, yet do not appear so when I am logged in.

Another good question: does it bother anyone else that superuser-level moderation occurs in secret without any public recourse or justification?
I'm responding to an argument that we could do just as well with 100 laws as we can with tens of thousands. You're reading it as an argument that our current laws are good.

I can simultaneously believe that we have many unjust or incompetent laws on the books and not be a libertarian.
I've read about fascinating sociology experiment along those lines. A sociologist was planted on a busy street, obviously trying to open a car door lock with a bent wire. The car contained an expensive television. No one called the police, they just looked at him curiously and kept walking.
This is a situation where numbers can mislead. Microsoft may very well be down 53% since Ballmer took over in January 2000 but do they mention that the Nasdaq, a tech industry bell weather, is down 50% overall for that same time period?

(ref: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EIXIC&a=00&b=1&...)
"Chicago cannot compete with Y-Combinator for social capital, technology resources, or entrepreneurial connections."

Maybe it's time to head elsewhere? It's too bad, too; the summers here are great, cost of living is low...
It would be interesting to hear where and in what era that happened. Some school districts are very loath to permit grade skips. My personal case in childhood was quite unusual: I was grade-skipped, contrary to general school policy, even though neither I nor my parents asked for the skip, when it became apparent that my learning at that date was well beyond the school curriculum. My skip was from fifth grade (elementary school) to seventh grade (the beginning of junior high) so I never attended sixth grade.

Since then, I have often pondered the insanity of dividing children into grades by age in the first place.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
Yeah, this series might be too elementary for "Hacker News", but I'm thinking there are some hackers out there doing iPhone development who are new to Objective-C and/or C or just not very experienced working in it.
Software vs wetware. This is just the software part, you still need something to physically detect the DNA.
Agreed.

Whatever the motivations of the agents referred to in the article, it is still the case that "inappropriate" laws were applied to (presumably) non-criminal activity. It's just speculation on my part, but my theory had to do with those how those laws came to exist.

Once the laws exist, then it's just a matter of any agent sufficiently familiar with those laws to apply them. By that point, it doesn't need to be vigilante activity. An agent with only the best intentions can end up causing harm (i.e. convert a free citizen into a criminal) simply because the laws are flawed.
I really don't think you can fairly call cows sentient. Along with chickens and turkeys, they are some of the dumbest creatures around. They're barely more than walking vegetables.
Good point - &, to be fair, let's not forget that even Bill Gates (among others) also underestimated the potential of the Internet in the early '90s...
> every one of those studies found greater longevity and fewer lifestyle diseases in endurance athletes than in speed or power athletes.

Do share.

I hope you know what I mean by observational and understand how it's a worthless way to develop understanding. It's for forming hypotheses.

Resistance training reverses aging in muscles: http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleUR...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_ea...

Short bursts of intense exercise every few days could dramatically cut the risk of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, according to an expert.

"If we can get people in their 20s, 30s and 40s doing these exercises twice a week then it could have a very dramatic effect on the future prevalence of diabetes."

Strong people live longest (I post this despite acknowledging it is also model derived garbage):
Jonatan R. Ruiz and his co-authors tested more than 8,000 subjects aged 20 to 80 for muscular strength. They grouped individuals into three categories of strength and found that the age-adjusted risk of cancer was 17.5 per thousand in the weakest group, 11.0 in the middle group, and 10.3 in the strongest group. The weaker groups also had higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, more cardiovascular disease, and more of them had diabetes. (Cancer Epidemiological Biomarkers Prevention 2009;18(5):1468–76).

>the actual study behind your NYT link paints a different picture than the NYT article did

No, it incidentally raised a question, just as the previous link about heart rhythm problems in cyclists raised a much more strongly indicated question about exercise induced damage.
You can also develop hyper sensitivity in you finger tips and feel when lock aligns. Lock pickers like this can allegedly detect the tip of a feather brushing against a toothpick being moved by the lock they are picking.
Ability to escape stars (*);

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864911

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...
I guess direct messaging would be best; Like you mentioned, privacy is a concern and making it a RT wouldn't afford any advantages that I can see. I can get notifications from twitter via a client app or SMS too so I don't think email would be a huge advantage either.
I can't wait until we can grow meat and other organs in "standalone-mode". There wouldn't be any need for slaughter when we reach that level of technology.
Then there's the fact that damn near every economist will tell you that a vibrant after market increases the value of first time sales. Heck, that's self evident, when you know something keeps a good chuck of it's value, you feel more confident buying it new. But software publishers never let common sense get in the way.
Lol (well, laughing through my tears...),

Well, the baby boomers would certainly go back to their long-term unrealistic "normal" if they could. And it's possible that a big enough round of public finance and private bubble may get this pseudo-normalcy going for a while - that's what all of the crisis intervention has talked about so-far; "getting banks lending again", "getting things back to normal".

Of course, we've seen in the last twenty years that each "return to normalcy" has been punctured by a bigger fall. I shudder to think what it would be like next time, if there is a next time.
The Xbox 360 never had to make profit to be successful. The reason the product was introduced is that Microsoft saw itself going head to head with Sony in a number of markets, and so they wanted to undercut Sony's big cash cow, the playstation.

As long as Microsoft reduced Sony's profits more than Microsoft lost money, the mission was accomplished.
If anyone has a good examples of strange for loop idioms, please send them my way.

For example, the infinite for loop:

for (;;) { /* do something forever */ }
Interesting.. Have you read Super Crunchers? [http://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart...]
I played around with that for a while, but there are some costs associated with SMS and I'm funding this completely out of pocket at the moment, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I feel that since Twitter is very accessible on smart phones, and some dumb phones, and you can set up Twitter to send and receive though SMS, then it's a better way to go. Having said that if enough people asked for SMS I'd certainly implement it.
I think Arduino aim to give you a uController to do cool stuff with - without you having to worry about the details of boot loaders.

Either way it's all great - goes back to the days when kids could monitor and control things from their AppleII and C64s rather than just stringing bits of frameworks together to make web pages.
I worked for a couple kids like this for 5 years, until July this year. They got lucky, they were in browser gaming really early with one of the first micro-transaction backed games out there. It also spread itself virally, pissing off a lot of people on the internet. Nonetheless it did gather a pretty large userbase and grossed more than 100k/month for a couple years.
But that's where it stopped. The kids that started the game had one good idea for the time, hired myself and a couple others to keep it a good idea for an extended time, but failed to move on and grow the company. Now they're grossing around 60k/month and panicking, rushing to add something else to their library.

It's one thing to hit on something that works, once. It's another to actually be an entrepreneur and know what needs to be done to sustain growth. Not very easy in the gaming industry because people get bored and move on pretty quick.