skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This cute legal theory hasn't been tested at web scale to my knowledge (closing down shop due to threat of lawsuit != the theory is tested, just that the depth of someone's wallet has been tested and found wanting).

What makes it curious in the web context is the following: say we can decompose the transmitted web page into the "content" and the "ads".

It is occasionally the case that the full ad content is directly embedded in the transmitted work but that is not the norm; far-and-away the most typical setup is:

- the content is transmitted as part of the page

- the ads are transmitted as scripts embedded in the page; the ads are thus not directly transmitted but if the receiving user's browser operates in a particular fashion than those scripts will execute and insert the actual ad-content into the page in a way the user can see it

If an ad-blocker works by stripping out javascript there is a smidgen of a derivative-work argument here.

If, instead, the ad-blocker works by altering the operation of the javascript interpreter (eg: leaving it unable to connect to the ad server) then nothing in the combined content+ads has been changed by the ad blocker.

If the ad-creating javascript were somehow involved in protecting the content (eg: the web page is transmitted "encrypted"; the page's javascript is waiting for a key to be transmitted in the ad content before decrypting the page content) then you might be able to work up a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, but your user experience would be so terrible it probably wouldn't make economic sense to do this.

All that said: an "ad-blocker" program is safe so long as it has substantial non-infringing uses.

Given the vast range of computers in use (in terms of cpu/ram/intended usage/etc) and given the vast range of hazards out on the internet (phishers/virii/etc.) a program that facilitates one or both of:

- "hostfile management" (blocking or restricting address to particular servers or ip ranges, etc.)

- "javascript management", adding additional checks or safety controls to how a browser interprets javascript

...is clearly going to have substantial non-infringing uses and should have a clean legal bill of health provided it is marketed as a generic security / performance solution and not an "ad-blocker".

Thus in the unlikely event that your legal theory vis-a-vis ad blocking is found to have teeth all that will be needed to continue ad blocking as before will be to rebrand the software as a more generic hostfile+javascript management with a way of sharing and importing configuration files from other users (allowing the users, then, to block ads themselves).

So as cute as it is this isn't a theory that will do much more than prevent any serious commercial ad-blocking venture from getting serious traction.
IT snake oil: Six tech cure-alls that went bunk
It's called LEC billing. There are several companies that serve as clearinghouses for these charges.
I love that your best reference for that is simply a wikipedia article. Have you read any of his work? Have you read a biography?
Idle 1.0 finally released
I'm from Germany. Our motorway has no limits :)

(Incidentally the refernce speed for German motorways is 130 km/h or pretty much 80 mph. Driving faster or slower is no misdemeanor or felony, but may increase liability.)
You're right. We just need to get everybody to subscribe and adhere to the same set of moral and ethical beliefs. That will not just fix Facebook, but, as you say, the whole world. We can make crime, war and suffering a thing of the past!

I can't believe the solution is so simple, and has been right in front of us this whole time.
Forums break down after they the number of users passes the Dunbar Number. It's only when you have so many users that the community loses cohesion that this happens. In many of the communities I participate in, forums simply split every time they get too large.
Technology, faith and human shortcomings (Billy Graham, TED 1998)
"advertising in general is a huge and successful business."

Isn't the whole point of this post that advertising is actually not a huge and successful business so you need to scam and deceive people in order to make real money?
Innovating Cron: Announcing Norc
One key difference is the amount of MindJet's time that you can tie up and consume over the matter. If a tiny fraction of customers started taking hours per refund, MindJet is in fact likely to change their refund stance.

The ideal outcome (for a MindJet hater) is to chew up as much time/energy of MindJet's (and as little of Chris's ideally) and THEN do the chargeback anyway.

I don't have that kind of time, so I'd fire off the minimum response to the company, then declare to my issuing bank that I was "unable to resolve it" with the company, get my chargeback and move on, but I do think that Chris's heart is in the right place here.
Hey, we're not the only ones. A known form of specialisation is when a mutant female prefers a slightly different kind of male. And her daughters have the same preference, and eventually you end up with reproductively isolated populations.
I didn't actually know that the site in question was run by this fellow, but I fail to see how it matters in the context of the linked article? Especially in a "someone is looking over my shoulder and saw me reading about world war I military history" fashion being comparable to "saw me looking at sexual imagery". I don't believe it's appropriate at all.
Democracy's design...

The scarce use of technology to encourage and access crowd wisdom. (Rather than the cleverness invested in things like gerrymandering and misleading advertising techniques.)

This is a similar phenomenon to the pathological cleverness used in so much social network advertising... you know, bait and switch, the devil's-in-the-details approach to supposed fellow decision makers.

I'm an anthropologist not a software guy. But the solutions are fairly obvious which I try to address elsewhere. Fortunately the reception is getting better in some places.
> I strongly feel, however, that it should be our goal.

The key issue to get sorted first is whether the aim is to help lower drug use (the camp I am personally in) or just to relieve some of the issues.

If it is the former then I think Sweden's example is the best; they have a very strong anti-drugs policy and there's is amongst the lowest rates of drug use in the EU. That's quite strong evidence for tougher laws.

If the aim is the latter (alleviate issues) then we need to discuss legalization or decriminalization. Decriminalization is much more likely but doesn't really alleviate the drugs gangs problems and the worries about control.

The other issue with drugs is control: if you limit the THC content in Weed how do you control that? And how do you stop a trade springing up (like in Holland) of stronger cannabis strains outside of the restricted THC limits?

It's a vicious cycle; the best way to stop the gang problems is stamp out drug use. THEN talk about proper legalisation. IMO. There is no other way to start with a clean slate.

Speaking personally I am for the relaxing of personal possession laws. I think a lot should be replaced with counselling and support (optional). But conversely I am behind much much stricter laws for drug distribution and supplying. Stuff like instant deportation, asset freezes / seizures, longer stricter jail terms.
I also use paper but I'm much more of a hybrid organizer than you. Some of my notes are on paper and some of my notes are electronic.

My prime counter example for not organizing solely with paper is when I am programming. Sometimes when implementing a feature that I've already planned out I get an idea for another feature. In this case I find it more natural to switch briefly to another program and write a short sentence about the idea. Then I can switch back and keep programming.

Oh and thanks for the links.
From the HN guidelines: »Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. (...) If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.«

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I should point out I am biased; one of my friends was killed after smoking marijuana and driving and another friend is now a dribbling wreck after 10 years regular smoking (one of the smartest people I know now has the intelligence of a 15 year old). I dont see how these problems wont be multiplied :)"

Would you prefer that your friends were instead locked up with several murderers and rapists?
The amount of money being made is definitely a WTF , the moot point of course is "There is a sucker born every minute".

Who are these people who are forking out real money to buy crap ?
I think the accent is supposed to make it sound more interesting and memorable. And foreign-ness can help cover uncertain quality: if I have a less clear idea of what perfect deliver would sound like, imperfections may not be as noticeable.

There are several accents I love to listen to, but I don't think I agree with the OP. Anything that makes the audio harder to understand is likely to be a net loss. If I can't get clues from the speaker's mouth because she's an invisible narrator or because the sound and video get slightly out of sync, and if your video is competing with the fan in my over-hot office or the Thundercats video my three year old is watching (he called them "rain cats" for a while), that gorgeous accent may be one difficulty too many.
No, I have never been to Amsterdam. I am aware of the shrinking in the number of coffee shops. This is mainly because of international pressure: they are hardening the rules for the coffee shops, trying to limit tourist's access to them. I don't agree with that, but I understand it: international pressure is not easy to manage.
Well yes.......... rather than be dead....

Seriously though I dont think many people are actually locked up for use nowadays. Im willing to be corrected but I haven't, in my experience, seen it much.

As mentioned below I believe personal possession laws should be refactored towards education, support and therapy (if desired)
A major change is that good search algorithms or giant server farms could become sufficiently useless that a remote search engine makes no economic sense.

I don't see that happening in the near term but there are sci-fi scenarios in which it might happen; I'll sketch them so the pattern becomes clear.

EG:

- user's local storage and local cpu / throughput goes through a quantum leap and most users most of the time have locally cached copies of any content they might find useful, and the cpu power to search it all efficiently

- some quantum leap in bandwidth and other IT infrastructure means you can scour large chunks of the web directly in a short time period (eg: if everyone had terabit fiber-to-the-home and backend infrastructure were built out enough you could just download entire websites and full-text search them in the time it takes now to search @ google)

- some quantum leap in "software agents" and safely-executing remote code comes to pass and users send out long-lived, virus-like agents that constantly scour-and-index-the-web-for-them (executing at the site of the content host

This is basically a sci-fi "what-if" but as a thought exercise it gets the point across: right now it makes sense to have a centralized spider-and-archive-and-index-and-rank facility b/c the web is so huge and its pipes are so tiny compared to the # of end users and their individual computing capacities; a sufficiently radical shift in end-user capacities would make it moot. All probabilities for the above I'd put at .01% or something similarly lame.

Weaker versions of the scenario include anything that reduces the use of the web and consequently reduces the need for search services:

- next-generation rich-client driven chat + forums + social-networks become the dominant areas of internet activity (with the web relegated to low-grade entertainment, reference material, and shopping); users don't need external search engines for these activities and the service-operators' databanks are deliberately opaque to conventional spiders

- despite all the naysaying the semantic web takes off in some fashion, with enough widely-used, useful-enough ontologies and so forth that user-run agents and user-run spam filters and user-run relevance+credibility assessors can auto-navigate the web to find what the user is looking for without passing through a conventional search engine

...etc., which I'd move up to .1% or so likelihood.
You just restate your theory as fact. What makes you think that wealthy families in developed countries with suddenly decide to have many more children?

The article offers a theory that in rural societies, children are basically life-insurance, and the more the better (probably to a limit). But a tractor is much more reliable than a kid, and as a family grows wealthy, kids turn into "liabilities" that you have to provide food, shelter and education for, with little in return (not talking about love and family, talking about having someone to give you food and shelter when you're old and/or sick).
Www.selfworkhome.com - Directory
I don't like long self posts as the colour/font is much harder to read than say default wordpress blog or posterous posting.
hence it was a gentleman's wager.
I agree, in general, that there is some threshold above which forums break down, but I suspect that your guess that it's Dunbar's Number can't be right.

Are you counting lurkers? Visible participants tend to be the tip of an enormous iceberg below the surface, and it's not always the same set that happen to participate in any given thread.

Also, must the threshold be the same for every participant? Dunbar's Number has to do with a cognitive limit on social relationships. There are many who pay little attention to the identity of those who post, focusing instead on what is being said. If I'm not tracking the people, why would Dunbar's Number be a limiting factor in what I can get out of a forum?
> Suggesting that someone live off of credit cards...

In one sense, this is obviously correct.

However, the poster/partner is also about to go ask their friends and family to put money at risk to grow this business; yet the poster/partner isn't willing to put N months of living expenses (small N) at risk for it? It could be a hard sell.
Bioidentical thyroid hormone doctors| low estrogen doctors
We specialize in natural prescription bioidentical hormone replacement. Dr. Holtorf and the doctors at the Holtorf Medical Group, Inc have been using and preaching the superiority and safety of natural hormones verses synthetic for many years (long before the Women’s Health Initiative Study). There are many doctors that now claim to specialize in natural hormones but our expert knowledge and experience can make the difference between feeling great and so so.
I have nothing whatsoever against the content of the linked excerpt (in fact I quite distinctly remember reading it somewhere else and liking it a lot). And I also quite enjoyed the discussion here. I just don't think it is so great if you link to content hosted by nutjobs. The article is SFW, so using NSFW was maybe misleading.
They might find themselves on the wrong side of the growth divide. Advertising money follows consumers ready to spend. US consumers are badly indebted. Most of the growth is going to be in emerging markets.

I get the feeling that people there may prefer their own national champions as they become more confident and less inclined to favor foreign brands.

The fastest growing regions often shape the fashions and trends. The people closest to those developments will recognise new trends first. So if there is some kind of paradigm shift in the making it may not be google who gets it first.

On the other hand I do remember the Japan hype of the 1980s. The japanese were supposed to take over everything until their own bubble burst. It's so hard to make predictions (at least about the future as they say)
True. But "Just friggin start it man" - a comment like that is borderline trolling.
Jeff Potter did this at Barcamp Boston 2009 and it was pretty cool. Also tasty!
Do you think it has value? What value?

Why are you refusing to make a substantive comment? Given your refusal, why should I make a second one?

Yes, debating who should go first is stupid. So why are you doing it? (I am doing it, now, b/c I am curious why you take this approach.)
In what sense does this prove that they are receiving quite a bit of traffic? I see one article, http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_9_10_Karmic_Koala_released got 1512 users, which means we have proved that digg.com got at least 1512 unique users. Granted, that this is not a fixed voting system of course. Secondly, how do I quantify 'quite a bit'? I think we can settle to say that you got no proof nor documentation that shows us the amount of traffic that digg actually got.
"AutoSys is a closed, proprietary system, and SQS / RabbitMQ are queueing systems, without support for scheduling."

Right, why would a message queue support scheduling?
To my mind, cross validation and boosting are the same: it only depends on the terminology* when you make use of your folds/sliding window of data.

* http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf -- just add the line: "x validation, boost"
Do you Google Wave? Google Wave as a Customer Support tool
Does your definition of "designing" not include the concept of planning? I can see how "building" could forego planning (and result in poor products), but "design" implies planning I would argue.

Some comments about evolution:

1) Evolution very often has results that, if it were the product of design, would be considered very poor design

2) Evolution is not random luck. It is anything but random. Mutation is random, but evolution by natural selection is not.

3) Things do not evolve unless:

- there's replication

- there are mutations that natural selection can "see"

- there is pressure for certain kinds of mutations to be favored
I sincerely hope you mean that the "bizarro-world" aspect of Fog Creek's products compared to TFS is that they actually are usable and work really easily. :)
I read his stuff occasionally and appreciate it when he makes a good point, which he does sometimes. At the same time, I feel a consistent smugness in what he writes. It's messages like "every other job in the city sucked" (and the implication that they still do) versus "FogBuz rocks", and "I don't want to live in 'lesser cities' [than New York]".()

There's also a lack of substance to much of his writing. Aeron chairs are what makes FogBuz great? Really? That's a pretty low bar to match. To me, a great company has purpose, vision, and smart-but-zero-ego people who enjoy working together to produce something that will actually make a difference in the world. Give me those things and I'll sit on a milk crate.

() (And, for the record, I live in NYC myself and think it's a pretty awesome city.)
video playback and compression is sufficiently cool, and could benefit from optimisation. Have a look to see if any help is needed in the ffmpeg tree at the moment.
"The Wisdom of Crowds" - as the book explains - applies only to questions with concrete answers, and it works because groups are wrong in a predictable distribution so that they average out to right.

I, for one, believe the state of social software on the internet would be better if people actually read the book.
Now you know why GOOG tried to play the card as being analogous to "Banking Secrecy", calling for immunity and special status. The issue is privacy.
Indeed. Lua seems like a twin to JavaScript that was separated at birth, and actually had a chance to mature before being released. I'm really surprised it isn't used more widely (outside of the game industry).
People jump to conclusions all the time. That graphic at the top of the page is quite evocative, for example. Besides, I'd like to have a respectable source for this article, so I know it hasn't been edited to fit a nutcase agenda.
thanks for factually contradicting my points. But true: I did not comment on the tubes (optic, u), nor the droids, neither the scholar (Terman)
But those pain meds are not listed on the DEA's Schedule I of drugs with high potential for abuse and no medical purposes. And therefore, those pain meds ARE legal (with a prescription), research can widely be done on them and variants, etc.

Alcohol and tobacco are not safe. Neither are red meat, fugu, skydiving, unpasteurized cheese, automobiles, bicycles, and 100s of other things (even including water!), that I'd prefer the freedom to enjoy if I choose, and for science to have the freedom to research.

I'm long past the point in my life where I'm likely to develop a drug problem. My 7 month old daughter is still too young, but I honestly WANT her to grow up in a world where the government exerts less control and influence than it does now. Do I hope she smokes weed when she grows up? Ideally not, but I want that choice to be hers, not mine, yours or the government's.
The left fold: weekly programming article digest: 2009-11-02 edition
High School Vandals Caught Using UPC Code at Walmart
That depends on the location. I think that in the USA people are still being locked up for marijuana use, although I guess that trend is thankfully going down. Can anyone confirm that?

Here where I live, in Brazil, you will get a lot of hassle if you're caught for marijuana possession. If you're black or poor, you're probably going to get a lot more hassle (being beaten up and being locked up for some time are almost certain to happen).

Generally, you can get away with 10 grams or something like that, but not without hassle. You better pray to Jah to not get caught :)
What it boils down to, is that if you create a community, then there will be people there that you do not like.

This is not a new problem with software. It happens even in person. If you have public meetings in a cafe or a library, with your small group of friends, they will want to invite others. Or somebody might come over to you and start talking.

Groups are always full of people you won't 100% agree with, or who will "dillute" the thing that you think you love about the group.

And people leave groups, too. Or they change.

Twitter, on the other hand, is not really social software. It's not groups.

Instead of people going to the cafe to meet - and, god forbid, having to deal with their friends' friends habits, or strangers - it's as if everyone has their own cafe, where only they can speak, all the time. And sometimes, like ships bumping in the night, those cafe-bubbles overlap.

Which is why Twitter is great for a lot of things, but not building the kind of community that Scoble is lamenting.

Because to form that deep type of connection, you REQUIRE "off-topic" chat, and adjusting to each others' idiosyncracies and social engagement styles. It requires compromise, and annoyance, and fighting and making up.

Without those things, you can't have a true relationship.

Relationships, among two people or groups, are messy and changeable.

Their frustrations are the very reason that they are valuable.
Sure, but nobody was suggesting they didn't already do this, unlike whitebit with Microsoft, whom I was replying to.
I used to fold a lot with a computer overclocking club I was involved in, and had some 10 computers of mine running at one point.. but now that I live on my own and pay all the bills I'm more frugal with my energy usage. Even with only my core i7 desktop that would cost a noticeable $10/month with my basic guessing, if it was running 24/7 at load. Then again, winter is coming up and the heat could help..
No, they're made out of dreams.
Customizing the Links bar
thank you for the thoughtful reply. now I have something queued up for when I finish my current Republic of Venice kick.
At 260+ DPI, the Droid will be my next e-Reader.
Space hotel says it's on schedule to open in 2012
Ranks of millionaire college presidents up again
someone should make overflowoverflow.com for all these sites