skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The publishing business and IP laws were alway backward. It doesn't make sense today, it doesn't make sense in the past.

There's alway people who scream about piracy and censorship and there are alway people who will supply it.

Cheap sheet musics. Banned books. Video tapes. Widespread British literature in America. Pirated poetry in Britain. The movie industry's move to California. The radio. Napster. Bittorrent.

Copyright law has alway been a privelleges of the monopolists. The pirates are simply people who produces and distribute despite the law.

All copyright and patent do is criminalizes the free production, distribution, and entrepeneurship in arts and the science for the alleged benefit of the public, authors, and inventors.

If ye try to criminalize a perfectly good pink act, it shall be a black act, and continues underground.

Also, please don't try to convince me about the morality of giving anyone a living. If an artist starve on the street and he refuse to find another, more fruitful occupation, than it shall be so. If customers do not wishes to buy arts, it shall be so that arts decases altogether.

The customers are kings. All the rages about "right to make a living" is moot when laid at the soverigns. All of prosperity depends on satisifying the customers' subjective preferences and all survival in a free market economy depends on satisfications of customers.

If no one is willing to pay for arts and games, why create it?
Sorry, this isn't very helpful, but I thought I'd take this opportunity to show the world this keyboard:

http://www.walyou.com/img/datahand-keyboard.jpg

Actually, I did have a coworker who used this. He typed absurdly fast with it. However, whenever someone else wanted to use his computer, he went on a search for a regular keyboard.
Yeah, that's the issue I'm having. You can see the situation for yourself at http://rinich.com and http://journal.rinich.com. I'm trying to think of what I could put on the home page to make it worth something, but I'm drawing a blank.
I'm not sure that it deeply matters in your case.

For the most part, there is no SEO magic that can override valuable/new/insightful content in the long-run.

Run your blogs as you normally would. People who like them will link to each one respectively. They will get mentions on Twitter. They will get indexed appropriately.

Unless you are in some highly-competitive keyword space it probably won't really matter much in the end.
This is, perhaps, another reason I prefer stairs beyond the nominal extra exercise[1]: I don't like being a captive[2] audience. I feel similarly about advertising inside of public transit vehicles and facilities.

[1] Perhaps another reason I hate high-density cities with high-rise office and/or apartment buildings.

[2] I'm not claustrophobic, even though I joke about being "trapped" in a little metal box, especially here in earthquake country. An elevator bigger than my car wouldn't be any more comfortable.
My problem would be trusting all of this information to a third party. At the very least, I would want a means of exporting the information in some open format to my desktop.
I agree entirely, I just understand why the established players act the way they do.
My worry is that they're getting indexed twice over.
I was a long-time resistor of Instapaper because I had my "to_read" tag in del.icio.us. But I would only very rarely return to that tag and go through items I had bookmarked. Plus I'd feel the need to come up with tags for an article I hadn't even read yet, based on what I thought it was about.

I finally started using Instapaper with my iPhone, and can't say how many times I've been stuck somewhere for a few minutes that let me read a longer-form article when I'd have been distracted by 5 other open browser tabs were I on my laptop.

Being able to click the Instapaper bookmarklet and not have to think about anything — not even be taken away from the page — has removed all friction from the process. I love it. I didn't even realize you could get a digest sent to your Kindle. I'm going to have to go set that up right now.
The fact that a big company has filed a patent doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to make a product. Usually it means that they care about that area in general and need some amount of patent "presence", some asset that they can take into negotiations to give them a bit of weight.
Apple already lost its "cool" a while ago.

Openness of iPhone Development (or lack thereof). 'nuff said.
Large companies have patents for multitudes of ideas that they don't actually implement. Getting worked up over patent filings like this is a waste of energy, since it's rare that anything comes of it.
URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation
I don't think there's really a big ethical difference between MS, and other big companies like IBM and HP. Each company does a lot of research that benefits the community at large; they also need to recoup that investment via patents, technology transfer and the like. Trusting IBM, for instance, any more or any less than Microsoft is a little naive.
why can't you just run x11.app and xmonad on mac os?

i use spaces on mac os and space 1 is a full-screen (but rootless) x11.app running ratpoison and two giant xterms. space 2 is a mostly full-screen firefox, space 3 is itunes, etc.
Maybe they're going to do the right thing and use the patent to keep other idiots from ruining the "mac experience" with garbage like this.
The Wikipedia Paradox: what's the most notable subject that's not notable enough for Wikipedia?

Now, one could reasonably argue that merely being the answer to this question would not, by itself, be enough to make a subject notable. However, the act of arguing this point, if seriously engaged in by enough people, would, in fact, make the question (and the answer) notable, and thus the answer to the question would deserve inclusion in Wikipedia.

Inductively, you can use this argument to show every subject is notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia. Take that, deletionists!

(Inspired by a lunchtime conversation with a group of physicists and philosophers.)
Besides the carousel restaurants, there's also the Automat cafeterias as precedent.
Apple hasn't filed the patent to implement it, but to stop others from doing so. It damages the Apple brand if third-party crapware like that mentioned in the patent shows up on the Mac, and they just want another tool in their pockets to get rid of it if they ever need to.
I seem to remember that a similar enterprising young woman who made myspace designs who almost or did have all of her money (~1million) taken from her by the state because of something about child labor laws, taxes or something.

I would just keep this sort of detail (her age) as quiet as possible, if I was her.
The television networks have not accepted a viable internet distribution system. Until that happens, Apple and others will continue developing treats to entice them.

Consider the recording industry. Apple had to use DRM that made purchases feel like the familiar single copy sale of the industry. Eventually the music industry got over that and adapted to unlocked sales.

The television networks or studios will be happier with ads in their internet distributed product, since it is how they work. Maybe they will get over it with time and accept a model that people prefer, or maybe people will prefer to serve the advertisers instead of paying for the content. Time will tell.
Drive A Car With Your iPhone
cf. the Unix philosophy. vim and timed both work nicely.
If anyone has been watching the new Apple over the past decade, it is obvious that they are not interested creating new market areas, but rather coming late to an established areas and beating the competition.

If Apple launches an ad-supported device, I would bet it will only be in response to a move into that area from Google or MS, after learning from their mistakes (just as they learned from the many problems of Windows-based smartphones).
Aw, come on. I definitely want a paper published in a peer reviewed journal – nothing more, nothing less :)
Then the plaintiff can follow the money trail and fry them all.
Ask HN: Please post information related to Non-Traditional Payment Models
I'm interested in hearing about innovative/alternative payment schemes suitable for digital goods. I know there has been a lot of research aimed at alternative models for the music industry. Here are some links I've found:

Ransom Model (some interesting links at the bottom)

--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system

Assurance Contract (related)

--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract

Article providing overview of some services that approach the music industry problem in different ways

--- http://www.last100.com/2007/10/11/music-industry-five-alternative-business-models/

Interested in reading what you all post!
Comet Server, based on XMPP streams
I don't think this is necessary. If something is boring, you'll forget it. If something is interesting, you'll remember it. You'll think about it a few times, and perhaps discuss it with other people. You'll link it mentally to other parts of your worldview. All these things will increase your ability to recall it when necessary, without effort.

To improve memory generally, stay fit and live a sober and useful life.

NB: I'm leaving this comment because I'll have forgotten about the article by tomorrow :-)
I would add to that as probably more important than the mailing list is the projects irc channel, thats where a lot happens
Fair enough - can we agree that we should all respect the author's intent (even after sale) when it comes to:

o Whether you can distribute duplicates to others.
o Whether you have to provide Attribution on duplicates
o Whether you can distribute modifications
o Whether you can resell duplicates for $$$
I'm continually surprised by the number of people who haven't figured out the recipe for a well-spent life only has two ingredients: passion and hard work.
How do we know this technology isn't targeted for the Apple Media-Industry-Saving Tablet Device? Is this how Steve plans to save the newspaper biz?
8 Google Wave Invites
The existing players rarely try to innovate within their own field. As you say, someone will step up to the plate, which will allow existing players to buy the new guys or compete with them in the new field.
I've discovered I can switch to the Sidekick plan (cost me a buck to verify that!), but it seems there's no known APN setup that actually works on the iPhone anymore. Most of the forums trying this gave up over the summer, it seems.
Any Gatech folks amongst us?
Will be fun to catch up with some folks in college...
Btw, did anyone manage to go to Atlanta Startup Weekend?
Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Uh-huh.

Let's modify the scheme just a tiny little bit:

"We're going to sue the first 1000 people we see violating our copyrights starting at 8:00, and we're not going to count people who we find during discovery accepted money from a 'defense fund'".

I'm pretty sure that leaves 99.999% of the original target population to sue.
I don't think that's a problem in this case, the article says she was 16, and it's legal to work at 16.
They're not "victims". They're "defendants".
You are correct. I should have said "a punishment"; however, even that would be technically incorrect.

But I guess what I mean is that the fame is pure karma which they shouldn't be allowed to rid themselves of because they committed murder. (I assume murder because "they were sentenced to life in prison.")
Actually, 'code' isn't a function - that would require different syntax for declaration and usage:

def dont(code: () => Unit) = // ...
dont { () => println("foo") }

It's actually a lazily-evaluated parameter of type Unit - Scala has optional laziness. This means rather than having to pass in a no-arg anonymous function (which requires the "() => expr" syntax as above) you can just pass an expression, and it's evaluated when (and if) needed instead of when it's passed to the "dont" method.

Laziness is the reason that this looks like a control structure, and not just a regular old higher-order function.
I'm addicted to the Give Me Something to Read feed:

http://givemesomethingtoread.com/

This is probably hand-curated...
Hundred-billionaire as in an individual with greater than 100 billion; not a few hundred people with greater than 1 billion.
wait I never heard of that, I know the girl you are talking about, but I never heard that particular story, anyone have a link?
You are right - I quite missed that.

Here's a slightly better article: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/04-protecting-your-vote...
That's an interesting idea. I wonder how it scales though.
You can if you know Haskell. If you don't, good luck understanding it, much less hacking it.

Don't get me wrong, I like xmonad, but not for the understandability/hackability of its source (which is opaque and unhackable for me, since I don't know Haskell).

I used xmonad for about a year, but then got progressively more frustrated as my configuration file bloated out of control and got to the point where I risked breaking it if I made non-trivial changes without extensive hand-holding from people who knew Haskell.

Eventually, I was faced with the choice: learn Haskell, or move to a window manager that used a simpler, actually understandable configuration file syntax. The choice was easy, as I did not have the time to learn a language as famously difficult as Haskell. So, I first moved to scrotwm and then (when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca.

I've been exceedingly happy with my decision to switch. musca is not only much simpler to configure and understand than xmonad, but is also much faster and lighter. Check it out, if you like minimalist window managers.
There are good ones, but mostly I think the pitch process is overated. Nothing like a good intro from good friends. Of course, nobody tell you that, coz' that's a little dirty secret.
Re-purposing your own possessions is not illegal. I bought a "dining table" at IKEA, but I use it as a "computer desk". IKEA also sells "computer desks". Am I doing something illegal by not using it for the purpose they sold it to me for? Of course not. (What makes OS install DVDs so special?)

Continuing with the analogy of tables, imagine there exists a set of tables and chairs and the table has special slots so that only approved chairs can slide under the table. You can use unapproved chairs, but they don't work very well, and don't slide under the table for storage.

Is it a crime to saw off the things that prevent normal chairs from fitting under the table and reselling the table?

So then why is it illegal when someone does the exact same thing but with software.
After some significant work with Google App Engine's data store, I can't help but think that the question "What are use cases for No SQL technologies?" should be turned on its head. Instead, ask yourself "Do I need full SQL database"?

For the typical web app, you can't really go wrong selecting MySQL or Postgres. However, you also can't really go wrong to pick something like GAE's data store either. Unless you need sophisticated dynamic reporting capabilities, a key/value store is actually easier to work with than a relational database. A static schema slows you down, but it is a price worth paying if you need to a powerful query language and aren't concerned about scaling.
Long tail!
Very cool. Love what you guys are doing at Superfeedr. Keep up the great work! Hopefully we can meet at the RT CrunchUp next week.

j
But of course, the judge is simply wrong about modification. Saying this is modification is like saying that an orange is "modified" if you duct-tape an apple to it.

(In this case, the duct-taped apple is the software that fakes the hardware encryption keys.)

Similarly, if this is illegal, so are the "imaging" procedures employed by every IT department I have ever encountered. I wonder why Apple wants to go down that road. (Of course, laws are only applied when someone is bothered. If modifying Apple's software makes them money, it's fine. If they don't make enough money, it's suddenly a violation of federal law. Just like if you're a rich white guy with cocaine, it's a fine, but if you're a poor black guy, it's life in prison. Glad that we approve of this here on HN...)
I have never sold software, and search out free alternatives so that I don't have to buy it whenever possible, so I couldn't say without completely guessing.

On the other hand, I'm continuously surprised what people will pay for, so ... possibly.

[Please consider listing your email in your profile]

I considered and decided against it (hence: it's not there :)). Email is a bit ... awkward.
Well, there's at least one perspective (accurate or not) from which your point doesn't hold.

As a hypothetical, assume that perception of quality within a domain is actually a trained skill, improved by incremental refinement via new experiences within the domain. Further, assume that highly-trained individuals can perceive greater detail, and from that can derive greater enjoyment. That is, a novice is overwhelmed by a few of the most obvious features, whereas an expert picks out subtleties and contrasts and has a richer, more enjoyable experience (there may be a parallel here to the blub paradox).

Under such a scenario, most novices (being unable to perceive subtleties) would tend to congregate around only a few examples in the domain that happen to provide the best experience at the broad, obvious level; a local maximum of enjoyment. However, by persuading a novice to experience additional examples that at the obvious levels may seem less appealing, they will gain both expertise and a deeper enjoyment of the domain, at the expense of growing bored with the simpler examples that lack subtleties.

New creations in the domain seeking to maximize exposure would tend to the minimum complexity level needed to appeal to a sufficiently large portion of the population. Lower complexity means fewer people expanding their experiences, reducing the overall level of expertise, lowering the minimum, and so on. Given the assumption earlier that experts obtain greater enjoyment from the domain, this results in a globally suboptimal outcome from individually sensible choices.

Of course, a fair number of people would disagree with one or both of the assumptions above (myself included). But I suspect many people who bemoan loss of quality would to some extent agree with the scenario I described, wherein quality is indeed valuable without there being demand for it.
These 'self-improvement' gimmicks are a kind of tax on people newly intent on improving themselves. They are beneath the dignity of a true hacker.

If you try to mess with your body language you'll just look creepy. I suppose an exception to this is if the person you're trying to impress is sufficiently dumb and insensitive as to not notice. In which case why bother trying to impress him?

Instead of trying to project the image of a confident, kind person, try being a confident, kind person. The body language will follow naturally.
Congrats and good luck! Wish I can do the same as well. I guess I still have a few more months to go although technically speaking I'm also ramen-profitable. Just that I'm lacking the idea to expand.

One piece of advice from someone who studies technology. Technology is all about saving time and money. Answer all your questions to that perspective and you will do well. And yeah, using a Flash site doesn't help people save (more) time.
Computerised exam markers give Churchill a fail
Myebookresells: All You Need to Know to Twitter
> I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising.

More promising in what sense?

> "I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways"

I wonder if you could describe that workflow programmatically. Then you could automate it ... as a number of the xmonad layouts do.
Definetely, we'll be there! With a bunch of stickers we can't keep :)
I agree with you. I would take the stairs, but I don't know where they are. (You would think, for fire safety reasons, that they would be clearly marked. But I have never seen any indication of their existence in this building.)

(I am OK with advertising on public transit. The government won't pay for public transportation, but advertisers will.)
Was referring to not handling developers well. OS X is around for about a decade.
If you are looking for a Windows-style clone of this keyboard, I have been quite pleased with the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard on my Windows machine.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices...
I see this too, ie openly self centered Indian bosses.
However what I don't think you realise is that most
everyone in a position of power, Indian or otherwise, have similar motivations to make their own lives better using the people under them.
American and European bosses however manipulate you in a way where you actually
feel good about it.
An Indian boss is usually the most transparent and fir that
reason the easiest to manage once you get past your
frustration with having to work with him.
All in all I now prefer a boss whose manipulations are
blatantly apparent to one who can skillfully hide the same.
I was a fan of this for ages, then I bought one from ebay.

Good things: It's a great design and it's easy to pick up since it's a lot like wrapping the top and bottom qwerty lines up around your fingers - the same fingers for many of the same keys, but no chance of misreaching and mashing two keys. The keys are magnetically held, and you push them out through an optical sensor - so there is a definite feel of breaking the magnetic grip, but you aren't whacking your fingers into a solid stop like a normal keyboard.

Bad things: The one I have is old and emulates a serial mouse, and Microsoft took serial mouse support out of Vista. The mouse emulation is serviceable but not brilliant. It's slightly awkward to extract your hand to reach for a mouse without pressing keys. You can't type one handed and hold a mouse/phone/mug of tea. No numeric keypad.

At work, the need for a mouse and phone made it awkward, at home I don't type enough solid blocks of text on a desktop computer (it's not much good for laptop use either).

I still like it and like the idea, but it's in a box, unused, because it's mildly inconvenient.
http://www.opencircuits.com/ is another great circuits website.
They thought of that. I didn't catch the details but they have something called the "Unused Ballot Audit".

http://sites.google.com/site/takomapark2009audit/audit-data/...
The users would simply think that Apple had made a crash-prone, piece-of-crap OS.

Turns out that this is not illegal. If you install Linux on a Macbook, people will think Macs and Linux are the same thing. Those people are dumb, and it turns out that I have no legal obligation to not confuse dumb people.

Also, as someone who uses OS X on Genuine Apple Hardware, I think that Apple has made a crash-prone, piece-of-crap OS. (This is largely VLC's fault. But VLC works fine on Linux, so the problem is clearly Apple, right?)

(As an aside, I wish I could post a comment at -4 so that nobody would have to waste their time downmodding it.)
You can do that, just don't let people buy the install DVDs at Best Buy.
Just watch out for infringement of patents :-/
Indeed it is! By this man: http://tumblr.quisby.net/
> but is also much faster and lighter

I bet its not faster (xmonad uses primarily O(1) structures, such as zippers, for focus management). And 1000 lines of code.

Window managers sleep 98% of the time -- I'm almost certain you can't observe computational overhead.

> when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca

That's the tension. Configurability needs a programming language. We chose Haskell since its high level and safe.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html
My point exactly. It's Poland. But this way folks here got 2 pieces of information at once: one about my selfish proposal and another about the situation in Europe ;P
They still would have been creating a derivative work, and so they'd probably still be screwed.