skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This idea assumes a higher level of knowledge in participants than the real world can provide. Even with an absolute media blitz, there will be millions of people who don't know about the 8:00PM EST file sharing apocalypse. Even with persistent hammering of the point, repeated lawsuits, etc. it would take months and millions of dollars worth of lawsuits for every file sharer to know about and understand the rules of the game.

People will not only not know the rules of the game, they won't even know they're playing.
discodb looks great for analysing analytics data

appending data to a file is a pretty cheap operation, just make sure you append properly and dont do something like read the whole file, append the string, then write it all, a lightweight server like mochiweb will probably have you handling more traffic than you can handle for a while before having to do a proper logging queue.
This strikes me as an idea that is useful and interesting as a sociological theory, but in practice it's pretty pointless. Imagine the terrible press that the RIAA would get if they announced that they would start suing based on such ridiculous criteria as IP addresses or time of day. The RIAA is already seen by many to randomly submit lawsuits en masse, and a tactic like this wouldn't exactly add credibility to their effort.
I've really come to like Apple's default keyboard; the keys are extremely flat, spaced apart, and almost silent. Although, the function keys are half-sized for no good reason.
XMonad is beyond hot, I recommend everyone to try it out. What I like best is never having to leave the keyboard to manage windows - talk about efficient window/workspace switching.
Turn it into a reality TV show.
William Ganz, Catheter Inventor, Dies at 90
This is fatally flawed, there is such a thing as a defense fund. All the 'cheaters' could pledge to each other to help out in case of a fine.
To be honest, I don't find it too small. Sorry. (No presbyopia yet, yay! )
Hint: the MIT prof referenced in the headline is Ron Rivest, the R in RSA.

While the description ("MIT prof") is factually correct, that's like describing Donald Knuth as a "Stanford prof". Both place the focus on the affiliation, whereas (at least with this crowd) the identity of the professor is more interesting and eye-catching.
Little Miss Sunshine

Pleasantville
Think before you eliminate.

Happiness is having what you need, not thinking "I had that a year ago, but sold it because I wasn't using it; where can I get another one quick." There is another Edison quote I've seen beside the one about inspiration and perspiration, "To invent you need ideas and a big pile of junk." These take care of 5, 6, and 7 especially for hackers/tinkerers.
I turned 30 last month, maybe that's the problem. ;)
I am very certain that almost all of them could be removed without reducing the theoretical power of Common Lisp. At worst, successive rewrites of the program could reduce it to using a different set of simpler forms.
Reminds me of the paradox of the unexpected hanging:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox

Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that is most effective as a deterrent.

I agree with the others, people won't care, they'll do it anyway and feel secrure that they won't get caught. The few who do will have no effect on the vast majority.

Mass behavior isn't rational.
If the cheaters can collude in an enforceable way, they'll each pay a small amount to A to cheat, giving A slightly more than $10, making A happy to take the enforcement hit. The cartel of cheaters still earns a net $16 by cheating.
I use a couple of small form-factor IBM keyboards I bought on sale for about $10 each a few years ago...looks like the Rapid Access III is the current model that looks pretty much the same, and they sell for ~$50. IBM historically makes really solid keyboards with a nice feel. The small form-factor brings Esc and Del/Home/PgUp/PgDn closer to the home row, without losing the number pad.

They're about five years old now, and probably due for replacement (they still work fine, but five years worth of heavy use tends to make keyboards kinda gross and key labels fade and such). I looked at the new Apple keyboards when I was at the Apple store with a friend, and for the first time in my life felt a pretty strong desire for an Apple product. They look amazing. I'm not sure I'll actually like it better than the IBM for long term use, though. But I suspect that'll be my next keyboard, at least to give it a try.
On a somewhat related topic. I find Paul Falstad's circuit simulator applet simply amazing. I had spent hours playing with it. (http://falstad.com/circuit/) [that page will start a Java applet).

Checkout his other physics applets. I like all the Quantum ones along with the antenna simulator.
You're right, it isn't new. I've read enough propoganda pieces telling me why I should get into open source; it would be interesting to read one telling me how.
Eventually, all of the clueless players will learn not to cheat.

It may actually take forever to get through the "clueless", slower than new ones are being born.

Most people do not act rationally and do not compute probabilities in their head - they simply do what others do and expect to get the outcome in the same ballpark. An infringer will stop infringing if three of the people he knows personally are caught and punished, feeling that this sort of stuff is probably dangerous. That's the only way probability theory figures into normal people's lifes - through numbers.

More effective punishment strategy would be to punish someone on TV - a popular character on TV screen tends to be "one of the people I feel close to" so a punishment of such person will have effect.

Of course another strategy is to make it convenient to comply - I started buying my music from online stores after all the DRM stuff was taken down. When people put work into making my life better I don't mind paying for that, unless they make it difficult.
It's not too small for me. But, the overall presentation could be made more readable.

I'd like to a larger font size, or even just bold, for the topic. At first glance, the "Ask HN" page just looks like a mash of random text.
One of the problems seems to be that nobody told the Lisp programmers that Lisp has been surpassed by Haskell.

Check out the Haskell page on Music and Sound libraries and applications: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librarie...

That stuff might be useful, especially if you like curses user interfaces.

Compare that to some of the Lisp APPLICATIONS in that area:

OpenMusic: http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/repmus/OpenMusic/

PWGL: http://www2.siba.fi/PWGL/pwglconstraints.html

Common Music: http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/

Symbolic Composer: http://www.symboliccomposer.com/windows/page_screenshots.sht...

Somehow the Lisp programmers haven't gotten the message that Lisp has been surpassed in all respects by Haskell - I wonder why that is. Do you have an idea why Lisp has cool applications and Haskell has curses-based MP3 player frontends?
It depends, the 'gray' stuff is hard to read (and sometimes that's where the interesting bits are). Apparently that is to encourage brevity, but since that doesn't seem to work it might as well be legible.

Ctrl-+ does wonders though. I've recently switched to a larger screen that I routinely run with 20+ pt fonts and it helped my eyesight a lot.
It seems you (as well as several other people) can only imagine a future with Haskell or Lisp syntax as if anything else is inferior. I find that to be foolish and immature.

Go was specifically designed to be a systems language, period. Lisp was never designed as so, and perhaps that is why its hardly used as a systems language today. Personally, I like Lisp, Haskell, and Python but I also know C is a great systems language even though its not perfect and its a bit passed its prime. Thus Go seems to be a good progression from the C/C++ family (I never really saw Java being a systems language but that's my opinion).

Anyway, I agree I think you're becoming a bit of a lisp snob. It might suit you to be a bit more open minded and objective. Even if you don't fully understand the design of Go, you should be able to understand that it was designed by people who have credible experience and skill in designing languages and systems. And sorry to spoil things for you, but the last thing I can imagine is Clojure being the next systems language.

Your post essentially is a brief comparison of a selection of fruits without much substance.

Lastly, here's a piece of advice:

"That's why I reserve the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem."
I think the cartel would be ruled illegal and shut down. Otherwise a business would have stepped up already to provide insurance coverage.
Apple Wins Like a Champ - Psystar is Toast -- What? You're Surprised?
"Psystar just got what's coming to them in the California case. Here's the order [PDF]. It's a total massacre. Psystar's first-sale defense went down in flames. Apple's motion for summary judgment on copyright infringement and DMCA violation is granted. Apple prevailed also on its motion to seal."
Awesome! Unfortunately, I'll be out of the country from Nov 21 - Nov 30. I'm willing to do something during the week next week to get the ball rolling though. All of my evenings are pretty much free this upcoming week.
All of the things he mentions can be found in most of the popular window managers. I fail to see how xmonad is revolutionary in these ways.
If you eat canned fish, try Jack Mackerel. It's cheaper and in my opinion tastes better than canned tuna or salmon.
Well yeah, you don't need all those special forms to keep the language Turing complete, but you do need them to provide a lot of what people regard as the "powerful" features of common lisp. I wouldn't care to program without flet, for example, but obviously one could remove flet without any loss of power in a certain sense.
iirc isn't there a chapter in Beautiful Code about this? http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046
I wonder how the cost of lost sales during the good times balances with profits from more consistent demand during the bad times.
>Other than type-safe heterogenous lists(which is only true if you hold static type systems to a much higher standard of type-safety than dynamic type systems), what sorts of things do a type system with type classes, algebraic data types, and higher order functions prevent doing?

Automatic serializing and deserializing of objects. I wrote the RJson library for Haskell to do this for JSON, but there is no way I would ever write anything like that in Haskell again. Using a statically typed language makes it necessary to use horribly complicated types and (in the case of RJson at least) to lose the guarantee that the program's types are decidable. Also, you tend to find that as the type system grows more sophisticated than basic Haskell 98, there is a much greater likelihood of incorrect programs type-checking correctly, so this becomes a less useful means of preventing errors. In writing RJson, I frequently had to determine the correct types for functions by trial and error -- it kinda defeats the purpose of strong typing when a function's type is harder to understand than the function itself.

In a language like Python or Lisp, with decent reflective capabilities, writing the equivalent library would be a whole ton easier.
I know that writing to log files is hard drive intensive. I also know that the preferred method is to write to a database

No. Databases are far more disk intensive than logging; they use vastly higher disk bandwidth, and depending on the database, often use lots of disk seeks too.
Would it be a cartel, or a voluntary tax? It sounds like it could evolve from a fine for illegal behaviour into a legal subscription program. The lawyers would be sad, but overall it might not be a bad deal.
Academia (mostly) is astrology for intellectuals;
management is astrology for not-quite-intellectuals.
I'm Indian and as much as it pains me to say this, its not gonna happen so fast nor easily. India is different culturally than a lot of other countries who have a good R & D environment. For example, if a guy or girl is not married by 35, it is usually frowned upon by the society. This usually leads to people playing it out safe in the 28-40 years era where its safer to work in a bigco with guaranteed income.

Pressures built up from social groups and joint families play a large part in this. Parents in India are usually more proud to say that their child is working for IBM or Microsoft rather than a small startup.

Also since I'm a resident of the country, I feel the urge in the people to compete but for needs more basic than in other countries. I'm not pointing to straight up poverty of farmers or anything you would see in a cover article of a big magazine, I'm talking about engineers wanting to have a stable job no matter what. They want a fixed house, they want a guarantee that they'll be eating from their own money in 6 months. Debts, specially credit cards are not the norm. There are scores of engineers who do not have a family that will be able to support them if they don't get external funding.

So for a multitude of reasons, sadly this won't happen. Not soon anyways. Feel the pulse of the engineers there (yes including me) and you'd know why R & D is on the backseat.
The Interesting Number Paradox
love the photo of a 'traffic jam' - they should visit Auckland sometime - they'd probably call that a parking lot ;-)
Interesting judgment, but I could do with less attitude in the writeup. But I suppose that that without the opportunity to perform the summary would never have been written.

They'll say, but, but, but ... what if they hadn't used the master and just used each copy, then would it work? Sons, why do you think Psystar used the master copy? Because it's a business, and in a business, efficiency is money.

Psystar used a master copy because it was more efficient, and because they thought it would work. But this still leaves the question of whether their operation would have been be legal if they had paid someone $10 to rip open the box and install the DVD manually. Perhaps this fits within their efficiencies, or perhaps it doesn't, but for me it's a legal question that I'd like to know the answer to.
Don't we all already do this at barcamp/asw/startup riot/startup drinks/etc/etc/etc?
Because it is Romania, Hungary, Czech republic, Poland, Serbia or Croatia.
In my defense, their homepage says in exacltly these words "API TO GET DATA OUT"

That being said...

So you can use all the browser variables via PHP/Rails/Whatever and then use Curl (for example) to post stats to their servers? Cool.

I was referring to the ability to do this by simply placing an image on your site which would require some JS, but I didn't think about it from this angle.
That's because this comes out of the (MIT) News Office. :)
NOSQL Business Use Cases
Yeah, it'd be all the same people.

Not that theres anything wrong with that :)
Ask HN: How do you do your usability testing?
I'm working on building a site and we're in the early stages of design. In my day job, we talk a lot about usability and user-centered design but have implemented very little. I want my project to utilize some of the methods we've talked about, particularly methods gleaned from Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" and Jakob Nielsen's well-renowned site.

My question is: How do you do usability testing? What lessons have you learned? What software and equipment do you use? Is there a key piece of literature I need before I jump into this?

My budget is very limited, as this (so far) is a boot-strapped project. Any advice is appreciated.
All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
Honest question, can you or someone explain to me why is fingerprinting everyone bad? And if so, how does it weigh against benefits that gives to effectives of police? Where I live we all have unique citizen no.'s and fingerprinting is mandatory when issuing an ID card (also mandatory) for I believe 60 years already, and no problem whatsoever.
This combines much of what I've wanted in a voting system:

o Physical Tokens - Something people can see and touch. Something that human beings can physically recount if they have to and will (at random) to confirm that the automated system has not been compromised.

o Cryptographic Verification - I can check after the fact to determine if my vote was counted. Supposedly only 2% of the population needs to check to determine if there was a compromise.

o Simple Counting system - The computer code required to count how many votes were cast for each party should be relatively straight forward and easy to verify.

After thinking about this for a while I'm not sure what happens with the False Positives - what if I write my number down incorrectly and can't find it after voting. I suspect that a certain number (0.5%?) will do so and now be convinced that there was fraud with the new system. Possible downside. Of course, the electoral commissioner will be able to take this into account - Let's say we have 100 Million people voting, and that 4% of those check their votes, and that 0.5 % of the people who checked their votes wrote the number down incorrectly, and 10% of those people report it to the electoral commissioner, there should be about 2,000 reports, on average, of Fraud.

Now - what about DELIBERATE false positive - an attack on this system is now to have the losing party overwhelm the electoral commissioner with reports of fraud.

The great thing about a system with Physical Tokens (Paper) is you can have scrutineers from both parties, in the presence of independent observers, _physically watch people count tokens and challenge_

Physical Ballot Box stuffing in a first world country is next to impossible, as long as you have strong representation from the population during the casting of votes and counting.

I hate the idea of purely electronic voting for things where the incentive to cheat is huge, and the recourse for the ordinary citizen to help ensure that the count is fair is absent.

Let's hope that this system (or something like it) takes off.
GO is only marginally better than C, and that's not exactly saying a lot.

Modula-3? Now there was a good language :D
It's generally true for traditional DBs, a few new generation DBs have options to buffer writes in memory and achieve durability via in memory replication in other nodes and only writes to disk sequentially in large chunks, which is better than simple logging as you'd have to sync to avoid data loss upon hardware failure.
This is a good question. I think children are best primed for understanding abstract concepts when they're young. Look at the success of Harry Potter, for example: magic and wizardry. Santa Claus, even. Teaching them to think about counting concrete objects before counting those elusive abstract and imaginary number-objects might not be the most efficient approach.
Is that compiling after the equivalent of 'make clean'?
This is bad, bad news! I wish that for once, the little guy could go up against the big monster and actually win.
Oh man, I had no idea.
Loren is always down for a party. :)
Do you have any recommendations for software I should use for a db? I like the idea of a db because doing queries on it will be easier.
Hmm. It would appear the the term 'robot' in the title is enclosed in quotes because, in fact, there is not a single robot involved in the delivery of the food...
There are still some good guys buried in the noise: Phil Hobbs, John Larkin, Jim Thompson, Joerg, James Arthur, Tim Wescott, Tim Shoppa, and Spehro Pefhany, among others.

I haven't seen much from Winfield Hill lately. Hopefully (fingers crossed) he's too busy working on the 3rd edition of AoE to spend time on usenet.
Ask HN: Help collections agency wrongfully ruining credit
They are trying to bill me for something that I disputed a long time ago and won.<p>The process works like this.<p>- They will try and get me to pay this bill and mess up my credit.
- I will refuse and cite evidence why I don't have to pay and have the debt stricken from my credit record.
- They will try and get me to pay this bill and mess up my credit.<p>I can't stop them from doing this! This system is broken as hell...
The apple keyboard is my preference too, but the wired one with the numpad! I have no idea why they didn't make a wireless one with a numpad :(
I've been frustrated with GA's new event tracking actually, and was going to try Mixpanel as an alternative. Here's my qualms with GA's events, maybe you've been able to work around them?

1) It doesn't tell me which page the event happened on

2) You've only got 3/4 pieces of data you can send (category, action, and an optional key/value pair). Even if you shove data into fields where it doesn't belong (i.e. category), its hard to send all the info I want.

As Mixpanel will allow me to send as many fields as I need, it looks like the right solution. However, as jaquesm noted, its just too expensive. I'm frustrated enough that I've considered rolling my own event tracking, but I'd much rather find an existing solution that works and won't break the bank.
I studied calculus on my own in my twenties, and I think the textbooks' focus on rigor led me down a lot of blind alleys before I started trying to come to an intuitive, often graphical, understanding of the problem before attacking the rigorous view. (There is a good textbook from 1977 that was reprinted by Dover in 1998, Morris Kline's "Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach", that I wish I had available when I was studying.)
It's not about little guy vs big guy. It's about what's right and what's wrong. I think the judgement was right.
Some of the items are regional (east coast/west coast), but Joe Navarro is great. His book on poker tells is amazing. Reading it is like taking off glasses the next time you play a game.
IBM Model M. Noisy as hell, built like a tank, best tactile feedback around (due to the buckling spring technology). Currently made and sold by Unicomp (http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net).
Lets hope so. Now that the government is tracking everyone on public transport with the "OV Chipkaart", and is going to track everyone in cars, there is no easy way for normal citizens to move across the country anonymously. Of course big criminals will have no problem avoiding being tracked.

Phone, internet, passport, transport, health care, cameras everywhere. When do I get a free webcam for my home? Why is the government so afraid of us?
> firefox url segmenting

what is that?
Glad to help. I'll ask him on Monday if he has any interest in outsourcing, if it was automated enough I would think so. Of course it would fall on me to do said automation, so we'll have to see what the numbers look like. ;)
Read Pamela's comments. I couldn't agree with her more. If you want complete freedom to duplicate and distribute, do so with software that guarantees you that freedom with an appropriate license.

As a Linux fan, I actually approve of anything that encourage people to enhance that platform with better graphics, fonts, and software.

Apple has made it very clear that they are going to actively oppose the commercial distribution of hackintosh system, so hopefully that will encourage the freedom loving hackers to develop for platforms more accommodating to their world view.
Enforcing the anit-collusion laws runs into exactly the same problem as enforcing the original anti-copyright laws, so that's not really a solution.
My favorite line from the article which I think captures the real point here is: "So, if freedom matters to you, don't sell out the goal of a completely free operating system, without any proprietary blobs at all." This is not about freedom, this is about making money off someone else's work.
This it's been done with every newborn in a few European states for a few years