skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess if an art collector buys an "original" instead of a print there is a feeling that they actually "own" the painting - even though in terms of viewing a print is equivalent and possibly more durable than the original.

How can you restrict duplication so that someone could "own" a virtual good?

DRM seems a little bit silly for things like music or movies or images because "using" a DRM protected object requires removing the protection just enough to copy it (despite the efforts of hardware DRM) but perhaps virtual goods like a house in a virtual world could be sold in a form where a copy cannot be substituted for the original. Is this possible? One can imagine a virtual house that contains the cryptographic serial numbers of all of the virtual bricks used to build it. The virtual world then only has to enforce a conservation of virtual matter...
Actually my thought was more along the game theoretical lines than that article. The Bluefin Tuna is screwed because each country's long-term incentive is to sustain its population and severely curtail fishing. Unless every country but one does that, of course, leaving the country that crosses the picket line to make billions of dollars at the expense of the others.
I'm sure you could give productivity apps a feeling of exclusivity by tightly restricting membership based on some exclusive criteria e.g. wealth, edu background, zip code, etc. niche products aren't a bad thing if the niche is very rich

Also wasn't this the idea behind that 20k iphone app that displays a picture of a red gem on your phone?
Well, the consulting business is full time already. I'm planning to grow it, and eventually introduce some products, as well.
Contract/consultant for now. Eventually, I want to to introduce some products, but at first, financial independence from Big Co. was my #1 goal.
the best part of the post for me, was the interview with Posterous. Amazing how much they have done, with a four man team.
My point is that with programming language abstractions, you can in fact remove things without hurting the theoretical power of the language, but actually harming the practical power of the language.

You do have to leave things in that you could take away.
Spain receives colossal amounts of wind energy from the Sahara. IIRC winds have been known to continue without a break for weeks, if not months.

When you have 9 million square kilometres to your south and an oceanic climate to your north, you tend to get a lot of wind.

The reason the UK gets so little wind in comparison is that the prevailing wind comes directly from Spain, just a lot later. Although anyone who's spent a few years in the UK can testify, you either have a weak Saharan wind or a strong Siberian wind.

The UK's best potential for renewable energy is if we ever get the technology to tap the gulf stream, as it wraps around the UK meaning it likely won't have to disrupt any shipping lanes. As the Gulf stream holds over 100 times the energy used yearly by the whole world, it could certainly be marginally tapped without any effect on the circulation. By marginally I mean we could likely supply the present day world without consequence.
If you're truly passionate about hacking it would be hard to avoid becoming a LISP snob at some point in your development. But if you're pragmatic, you'd be able to transfer what you've learned from LISP to other environments, that may be better suitable for today's technological landscape. Is Google Go the way to go? Only time will tell. But there's little you can usefully do with LISP these days (unless the scope of the program you're working on is so restricted that you really only need the language purely).
It diminishes the weight of their argument for legislative action, when the default is to take no action. The fact that illegal activity is occurring is not, on its own, sufficient justification to put extra time, money or legislation into fighting it. Here in the UK, where it's illegal to rip CDs onto an iPod, millions of people do anyway [[citation needed]], but not even the music industry cares.

When all the labels were doing was filing private copyright infringement suits against individuals, they didn't need any justification besides being legally in the right. But now they're lobbying for legislative support in enforcing their copyright. They're arguing that a) the prevalence of file-sharing is harming artists, and b) harming artists harms society, and therefore c) state-backed enforcement for their infringement claims will benefit society.

b) is the part of the argument that copyright reform proponents like to attack, but a) is just as important to the argument. The figures in TFA seem to show that music industry revenues grew over the last four years, and that artist revenues grew even more. If so, that puts a serious dent in the claim that file-sharing harms artists, and therefore in the argument for state action.
Actually I know coders looking for a business guy with a condition that he is a former coder. For instance, reading HN is a plus for a candidate.

Ha ha only serious. The job is located in the EU, in a country with one of highest GNP in Europe at the moment.
Ask HN: What are your favorite apps for E71 / Symbian V3 mobiles
Give a list of your favorite apps for Nokia E71 / Symbian V3 mobiles. If possible do write about why do you like those.
> "3. If I look around and don’t see programmers. I can smell programmers. A good company is full of them. Posterous, for instance, has ONLY programmers. FriendFeed had something like 13 programmers and one other person. Great ratio."

i wonder about this. currently my startup is me and my co-founder, and he's not a programmer (though he can handle version control, html, css and critical thinking). as we grow, should we plan for more outreach/sales/customer service type of folks with the same tech growth, or more programmers to explode on technology platforms and innovation?

i know it depends on our company. i've heard many different pieces of advice.
And yet Antoine is famous for book-length works, not poetry, and certainly not minimalist poetry.

Don't take the lesson too literally. You can, in fact, take too much away. How much you need to put in depends on your artistic goals and, of course, on your audience.
The API appears to be for getting data out - creating your custom dashboard.

Just getting data from a pulled image won't provide browser data or referring data. Javascript is unfortunately a pretty important requirement to get accurate data about visitors.
Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932976
How do you know it's not running X?
The article references "Passage" a game written by Jason Rohrer. If you haven't played it, you should - it's extremely hard to describe, but in short, it is a sort of simulation of life. Not like the Sims - it's about 300 seconds. At the end, you die.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

Extremely unsettling to me, a very "momento mori" moment. Love the concept and execution though.
Ask HN: Take a Look At My Site - Studylance.com
Hi All,

I submitted my site for feedback here a while back and got some really useful feedback.

I'd be really interested in getting some more feedback now a few months have passed.

My main concerns are that the question posting process isn't working well enough and people are dropping out before posting their question.

Also the mechanism for responding to questions may not be clear enough,

Any feedback on design/usability/coding would be much appreciated.

The url is:

www.studylance.com
Latest DVB transponder updates 11-14-2009
I've been thinking awhile that i might make a similar post to this one at some stage. Not being a programmer and beginning a startup that requires programmers without one at hand already is quite difficult. That being said I personally would never do a pure software startup. However of late i've come up with plenty of good business models that have a software element but also requires skills that I have outside of what they try to teach in a commerce degree. With that situation it seems a more equal partnership and also allows a greater sharing of the main company functions, something that helps down the road. I would suggest you look at doing a startup where you can really contribute to the actual creation of the product/service.

The other thing about writing these pleas for help/founder is that you've got to show a little leg. "Software as a Service business" is hardly going to bring the hordes knocking down your doors. Even if you don't want to give your ideas away at least narrow down the areas of your interest because your much more likely to attract someone good if they already share that interest.
Link goes to Newsweek front page. Permalink for article?
Rot 13 converter
Converts Text by Rot13, Rot5 and rot18
Yes. The Monterey Bay Aquarium ranks fish based on sustainability and publishes the lists as pocket guides. I always carry it with me when I go to the market. The list is at http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx if you're interested.
I give them a lot of leeway because of this principle. But there's a lot of low-hanging fruit they've failed to grab:

- No way for small bug fixes to jump the queue.

- No way to pre-screen app concepts, so that the developer can get a rejection notice before doing the work.

- AFAIK, future releases are not routed through the same reviewer as previous versions, resulting in nonsensical rejections for previously existing characteristics.

- Again, AFAIK: No second pass for rejected apps, with an eye to the P.R. impact of the decision. I'm all for employee empowerment, but anecdotally, reviewers seem to make a lot of arbitrary decisions which the company backs with little examination.

- No feedback mechanism on your place in line. The wait would be a lot of more tolerable if I knew I knew how many days or weeks it should take, on average.

Simply put, Apple hasn't made developer relations a high priority, which is unfortunate; failure to do so in the 80s and 90s is part of what kept Macs in single-digit market share. iPhone may be king of the market now, but pissing off devs is not a good way to stay there.
If you get into compilers and language design, all languages turn into more formalized versions of Lisp mixed with some libraries and macros. Lisp in many ways is little more than a serialization format for a syntax tree, with a DSL for converting that tree into an executable program.

That's both its biggest advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage in that it can be stretched and flexed to cover any problem domain, by rigging up a language suited to the domain. On the other hand, the fact that it's so flexible means there's less common points of reference for composition in the large. Learning a language for a domain is usually more work than learning a library that uses familiar idioms, even if it is more flexible in the long term. If that domain isn't your bread and butter, a library suits you better.

It comes down to an economic argument, I believe. Some level of centralization is necessary to overcome the transaction costs of fitting lots of little languages together, which each have their own ideas about how things should work. It helps hugely in tooling, debugging, analysis, etc. Syntactic transformation via macros from a high-level language to a lower level isn't enough to create a practical modern language in the large. You need more.

As to the practical applicability of Lisp, I think you can get most of what you need with something like Clojure.
Yeah after I posted I looked at your profile and realized you were probably sleeping :)

I'll touch base out-of-band.
i'm indian and this vivek randhawa guy is starting to piss me off.
can we just ban techcrunch on HN?
Why the snark?

Somebody who hasn't gone to university and managed to keep a business afloat for 8 years has to have some skills in sales in marketing. Otherwise you just don't make it. Starting a business and sticking with it for a couple of years is not that easy, and it probably makes him a lot more qualified than most of us here.
Clickable: http://www.studylance.com/
Nice troll. Isn't Hacker News written in lisp?

EDIT: HN is written in Arc. You're saying that there's "little you can usefully do with LISP" on a site which was written in lisp.
This, while impressive, is not a routine occurrence. It was due to abnormally high winds. Consider the following quotes from the Guardian article:

"High winds over the weekend supplied 53% of Spain's electricity"

"Experts estimate that by the end of the year, Spain will have provided a quarter of its energy needs with renewables, with wind leading the way ..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-nati...
not exactly, but fps et al are certainly a shrinking part of a growing pie.
Good read: cPython's dictionary implementation
I can see Apple's point about not wanting anyone else to infringe on their trademarks and representing their application like anything officially from Apple. I can see that. That is one hundred percent reasonable.

However when Apple demands that you explicitly write code in your software to detect if any bits or bytes you push to the iPhone screen originates from Apple somewhere and block that, that is something completely different.

If that is the line they require people to follow, the following is a list of applications I can see requiring rewriting to follow the guidelines: VNC, Web-browsers, picture viewers, feed-readers, audio players displaying artwork. Basically any application displaying anything from any network source, maybe even local sources. Heck, any application displaying any bitmaps at all.

If Apple indeed thinks this is a reasonable line of thought and expect everyone to follow it, they should provide a public API to ease the burdons of the developers. They could make a function like NSContainsAppleTrademarkedComponents and require all applications to use that.

To really make things easier, they could redo some parts of the API, like making a NSShowBitmapAppleOnly function which actually displays a bitmap, and a function available to the general public called NSShowBitmap which automatically invoked and checked via NSContainsAppleTrademarkedComponents.

Somehow I suspect that Apple understands that this is an impossible task, a stupid thing to check for, and that they will in no way be willing to write the code to make this happen, no matter the size of the company and resources they have available.

Yet somehow they expect any small developer to do this.

Apple is definitely the worst control freak out there, restricting absolutely anything they can restrict, and yet people still say Microsoft, with their relatively open and reasonably well documented AIPs (there are horrible exceptions and yes I know), that with all this evidence to the contrary that Microsoft is the bad guys.

I just don't get it. I don't own an Apple computer, just an iPhone, so maybe I lack the essential hardware required for absolute self delusion.

If the way of Apple is the way of the future, I don't want a part of it. When I develop stuff, for a mobile platform or not, you can be sure Apple won't be on the list of supported platforms.
May be in a zillion years.
Rethink for calorie eating levels
I think that's step in the right direction.

Maybe for UNIX junkies. Other people would like to use languages that don't suck and operating systems that aren't retarded.
Who thought the industrialization of gaming companies would lead to bland games? I for one am shocked, SHOCKED!
This is definitely a step in the right direction. However consider this: what about all of the products that are imported into Spain that are not produced using wind power. When we consider energy consumption we need to consider all consumption, not just what goes into the grid or how we heat our homes. One of he most energy intensive industries is agriculture where producing fertilizers and pesticides takes enormous amounts of energy. Note also that as with many other industrialized nations Spain imports more goods than it exports (http://www.fita.org/countries/spain.html) and much of the imported goods come from less developed countries where there is much less emphasis on clean energy.
Interesting -- that's not what I have here.

Link http://www.newsweek.com/id/222472

It includes the article id, which, at least on this machine, takes me to the article.

Here's the print link which I should have used anyway: http://www.newsweek.com/id/222472/output/print Maybe that will work better for you
I don't know what that page does; is this an attempt to take over accounts, or am I just paranoid today?
Experimental evidence suggests that people want to use Visual Basic and Windows, actually. Although the language stats may have changed since the last time I looked at them, I'm reasonably certain at least Windows is still on top. Make of that what you will.

Edit: For what it's worth, I have some sympathy for Microsoft's position. I don't doubt that if they could just break away from backward compatibility they could make something far less kludgy than what they have; unfortunately, if they did break away from it, they'd lose an awful lot of money. Alas.
It's a typical spam post. Just flag and move on. :)
*during high winds, at 5:50 on a Sunday morning
Having creative people that can think through good product and web design is very important. If the experience and product is not designed well, it doesn't matter how many programmers you have. Even the best programmers won't be able to program a good experience out of it.
Thanks very much for your reply. I'm glad thats coming across. I'm certainly not an MBA with a game changing idea that I'm 'allowing' someone to work on - quite the opposite. The idea itself is important, but the execution is the critical component.

I'm also down with the ultra clean 'as few features as possible' mentality, so I'm looking forward to having a chat with you.

Agreed - there are worse situations than being unencumbered and single in Japan.
Yes, but only when young and skilled people around the world would travel to Bangalore, instead of California.
Thanks, I hate it that HN doesn't allow clickable links in stories description. Isn't the web all about links? Lame.
Overall it's pretty nice.

I like how you can post your question and it gets you to sign up slowly step by step.
UI is pretty nice and also fast.

About us should have some more meat.
FAQ and Contact us at the top don't work.
Should have a similar quick way for tutors to get started like you have for questions.
Clicking on cost to sort by cost causes an exception.
Overall maybe a bit too many rows with links which is a bit confusing. Maybe simplify the navigation a bit.
Why have the see all categories? Why not just show them all? NOt that many anyway.

I wish you a lot of luck!
Philip Greenspun was referring to the OPS (Open Profiling Standard) and OSCC (Open Standard Content Cookies) cookies . These were browser stored cookies that could not be bypassed. The theory behind these were that every browser had an ID, and that ID could be tracked for profiling purposes without compromising privacy. That magic cookie would be sent to every site so that cross-domain sites in the same network could establish the browser as the same surfer.

archive.org is down for maintenance, but, http://developer.netscape.com/ops/proposal.html is the original proposal. developer.netscape.com is no longer online and mozilla.org never received permission or wasn't able to resurrect the site.
I'd never heard of it, actually. I will give it a look - thanks!
You seem to be complaining that... Lisp doesn't exist? You seem to be saying his complaints are of the from "A hypothetical language I have in my head can do that better", but the complaint is of the form "This existing language does that all and better."

Given that the only other "problem" in the post is a Hello World post, surely you aren't complaining that the author failed to include a "Hello World" lisp program? Well, here you go:

(print "Hello World")

I do not understand what you're saying at all.

(Also, I'm not a lisper. In fact I'm increasingly of the opinion that it represents a wrong direction for the future of programming languages. So this is not a "pro-Lisp bias" thing.)
I'm waiting for a Lisp dialect with significant white space. I think I've turned into an anti-brackets-of-any-kind snob.
Those guys, who designed it were not amateur. The main goal is easiness to code for average offshore programmer (hi, Java). Just name it 'C 2.0'.
Ease Your Back Pain with Stretching and Pilates
I thought my being downvoted here had more to do with linking to a negative (towards Go) comment, rather than the comment itself. My other comments critical of Google Go have been generally upvoted. But you're right. I think if Google weren't involved, nobody would even give Go a second look.
I don't equate not being a "tech guy" with being qualified or good at sales and marketing.

I've learned a lot about sales and marketing, and I consider myself to be pretty good at it, but it's not my main profession.

My advantage is that I've been the sole salesperson for my company for a couple of years in the beginning, I have experience selling small and large scale IT products and services, and my company has resources to hire salespeople who I can train and assist.
I think this blogpost debunks this pretty good:

http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/11/spanish-wind-power-exposed...

Spain only gets about 9% of energy from renewables on average, which is much less than a lot of other countries. The 53% number is very deceptive IMHO, and really shows that you can't count on wind for reliable energy.
Well, there's necessary complexity and unnecessary complexity. Perhaps he felt that in order to communicate the ideas and story in his book, he had to write a book length work.
Please, don't send passwords over the clear via email:

Your account has been activated.

Login: somename
Password: [redacted]
I think the natural progression would be to have the additional developers working for the project lead.

I see how that could be mis-read, my mistake. What I was trying to say was that I'm looking for a partner who can help run the technical aspects of the company, including management of the subsequent technical staff.
The web market works, of course; the app store is just a specific distribution channel that has its advantages over the web:

* everyone who needs to do something on their iPhone goes to search the app store even though a web app could serve their needs better

* users like the reviews and trust apple not to allow harmful apps in the store

* the app store provides an easy way to charge your users
Lisp programmers already tend to use the indentation the way adopted by Python. Add more rules for indentation and newlining, and voila: all or almost all parentheses become superfluous.

(But you need to really like white space!)
The sex determining chromosomes are just two among 23 chromosome pairs in the human genome.

All the number-play in the article is completely pointless.
These R&D centers still depend on hired resources. People who sell their time and services for a salary. But as I understand it, Valley's big portion of success is in its startups and their founders. People who take risk to create wealth and jobs. They themselves may not have all the required skills to succeed. But they hire others to fill that gap. They take that risk as part of their entrepreneurship. This is what is missing in the R&D centers in India. There are a lot of bright people working for others. But not for themselves. This will change in future. But we are not there yet.

My hunch is its going to take a lot more than 5 years.
Thanks, will be sure to change that...
Tilapia may well be fine as they are largely fed a plant based diet.

Salmon are fed a fish based diet. The fishmeal is obtained from less desirable fish but they're still taken from the oceans. Their stocks won't be as dangerously low but eventually they will be consumed.
Thanks! Good to hear some positive feedback about the question posting process.

Users have to confirm their email before the question goes live, any opinions on whether that is necessary?