skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stumpwm is in CL and you can read it. And while googling a second ago, I found this http://tronche.com/gui/x/gwm/html-manual/

Lispy window manager; gonna chase down the author's page and see if this gave birth to any research papers.
Lotus v. Borland was not the same. As a matter of fact it was a very stupid lawsuit and rightfully dismissed.

>None of the source code or machine code that generated the menus was copied, but the names of the commands and the organization of those commands into a hierarchy were virtually identical.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int...

In this case MS not only copied the interface of plurk, but from the look of it they also stole the code. Such a blatant copyright infringement has never happened before at this level to the best of my knowledge.

Your claim that it is "legal to copy UI in US law", based on the above example, is false.

Copying a menu, its command name and hierarchy is not the same as copying an interface. A menu is only small sub-set of user interface.
Incidentally:

* Wikipedia: founded in 2000 using wiki technology developed in the mid-1990s.

* Google: founded in 1996, domain registered in 1997, incorporated in 1998.
That's wonderful, thanks!

Is there anything Google doesn't do?
Well you have to admit that the readership does really like making things... Coding HN readers just combines 2 of their favorite things :-p
People get used to things extremely rapidly. A lot of the stuff we use daily would seem almost magical to some people living today, not to mention 2-3 generations back.

You can search billions and billions of documents for free in less than a second, and my parents had to buy non-scientific calculators for insane prices.

Supercomputers from not so long ago probably couldn't play 1080p video decently.

Cellphones went from bricks that cost thousands to cheap things that everybody has.

Cars now have more computing power than computers had recently.

We're building massive databases of genetic information and annotating it rapidly. The cost of sequencing base pairs of DNA is dropping very rapidly.

But people still think nothing is changing.
Open source software isn't quite a 'textbook example' because the classic concept of 'public goods' predates nearly-free, perfect digital reproduction.

The 'textbook' definition is 'non-excludable and non-rivalrous', meaning: you can't stop people from benefiting from it (non-excludable) and one person's benefit doesn't 'use it up' for another person (non-rivalrous).

Well, you can exclude people from using software in a variety of ways (secrecy/contracts, technical measures, copyright law). That someone chooses to give software away doesn't make it 'non-excludable' and thus subject to classic public-goods analysis.

Also, the choice of how to provide non-excludable goods that may be challenging to finance doesn't reduce simply to "if free riders are a problem, then taxpayers should fund". Lots of other cultural/institutional arrangements are possible -- the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics went to work into the variety of arrangements used by societies to manage common resources.

A movement to have 'taxpayers' subsidize open source is just as likely to lead to overfunding for the wrong reasons as 'right-sized funding' which exactly offsets the underproduction theoretically caused by free-riders.
A nice summary of why Google is different. How refreshing for a company to ask themselves, "How can we create more value?" instead of scheming how to extract more value from the existing market.
Some people who are used to squatting toilet would squat on seated toilets. Sitting down feels too weird for them.

With less body contact, it's probably more hygienic as well.
I find it disturbing how many people decided to comment or up-vote on Joel-Atwood angle, or insult each other.

Remember: great people discuss ideas, normal people discuss events, shallow people discuss other people.
Also the proof that Google is "good" is that they haven't banned their competitors from search results? That seems like a pretty weak argument to me. Perhaps Google is more ethical that some of other companies. At least they aren't like Microsoft, ripping off Plurk, but that doesn't make them "good".
But we also covered a lot more than a static type check could cover at compile time, right?
It indicates intent and state of mind. "More guilty" is just an expression that means "more evidence for guilt."
I never noticed a speed issue with TinyURL, so their third point is pretty silly to me. Also, add a 4th point, "Self-Serving: if the target page has moved, we get a chance to serve you a redirect with our ads on it".
It does apply to you in that you probably won't live as long as the rest of us. :)
I don't know, not to be nit-picky, but how am I supposed to believe a future human society can fly special forces to a far away planet and mind-control a genetically modified species, but still can't get a paralyzed dude to walk again on the cheap?

Maybe health care just sucks that bad in the future?
I did that once and hated the results. I glued it to a wooden backboard and it's very obvious where there is glue. Maybe it's just my poor craftsmanship, but if I were to do it again, I would look for some cheap glass (old shower doors on craigslist) and paint the back of it white.
The real reason Google is getting into the mobile business
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The mistake with business plans is the tendency to focus on the wrong
objective.

I think creating a written plan for any goal of a startup is a must. It
allows everyone involved to review the plan and point out any holes in
your thinking. It also presents a complete communication of your ideas.
Just winging it, for example, using a conscious stream of thought to
explain all the details of a proposed plan is difficult for both the
speaker and the listener.

The problem with business plans is they tend to focus on demonstrating
how the startup intends to make money. Revenue should never be the goal
of a startup. Revenue is a by-product. It's a measuring stick which
co-founders can use an indicator of whether or not they are succeeding
in solving the end-user's problem. The overall goal of a startup should
always be to solve a specific end-user problem.

http://www.igeejo.com
Disney got its start by taking content out of the public domain, making it proprietary and selling it. Google got its start doing pretty much the opposite.
What's up with a few of your "to's" at the end of your last sentence? :-)
Straight D’s in kindergarten

/cringe
Writing OSS is close to research, especially when it comes to projects like new programming languages. Even then, my point was that government stepping in to deal with cases of market failure is not a radical idea. And the NSF has an answer to all of the questions you raised.

The reason government funds research is because the value provided by basic research cannot be easily captured and sold. This same logic applies to OSS.

Why is it ok for taxpayer dollars to go toward research but not toward building stuff that wouldn't otherwise get built?
* Chances are, we will log all the links you click and associate them to your account even though you don't want us to do it.
The funny thing is that it contains about as much substance as a "TED Talk," but without better visuals and an animated delivery I have a hard time taking it seriously.
Chinese software piracy: if you can't beat it, join it.
Whoa, my eyes are bleeding, but surfing just got 10x faster.
This comes right after Facebook has announced their own, http://fb.me/
This whole coffee thing seems like a distraction to me. The Microsoft toolkit is very primitive. It doesn't do much more than run standard system utilities that are freely available, and log the results to a USB drive. It is an amateurish tool for people who know little or nothing about computer forensics.

Any law enforcement agency worth its salt is going to have a computer forensics department smart enough to remove the hard drive from the machine in question, and examine it in a non-destructive way. Thus this decaf toolkit is useless.
Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies.

But I wonder what the next paradigm change will be. Some (Thomas Friedman among them) say it's going to be energy revolution: cheap, clean, available energy for everyone. I think that's a pretty good bet.
Objects aren't abstract data types because an object contains all of the methods to operate on the ADT in the same place.
Doesn't this sort of rely on there being a OS to host it? How can Decaf run if the cops have booted off their USB stick and the onboard HD is just being scanned?
They have probably tested is collectively, the poor bets going out of business and good ones staying in.
"iPhony" (Gruber post quoting NYTimes about a future "Apple Phone") [2002]
Jquery.mb.scrollable 1.5.5 released
This whole ordeal is getting me motivated to actually buy a cloud backup service (personal use, not business use). I was thinking of Carbonite or Backblaze. Anyone have any experience with those?
How is that different than any other link shortener? This reflexive Google hate is getting ridiculous.
I've read through parts of Ratpoison, aewm, Awesome, XMonad, Blackbox, and other WMs over the years. Short source like this can be very helpful in other ways, though - seeing a very simple Scheme interpreter or minimal webserver in Python (or whatever) can make previously "hard" things more approachable. The "hey, you can do this too" energy or big picture insight from overly-simple-but-still-functional code can be just as helpful as deep references sometimes.

As WMs go, I've had an itch for a while to write a skeleton WM in C with hooks to script it in Lua. dwm continues to work just well enough for me, though, and I've already got too many projects. One of these days... (And no, Awesome and XMonad don't do it for me.)

Also, for anybody doing any kind of exploratory X WM programming, it's incredibly helpful to use a nested X server such as Xnest (http://www.xfree86.org/4.0/Xnest.1.html) for debugging. Something like this should work:

#!/bin/sh
# -ac allows connections
Xnest -ac :1 &

Then you can say e.g. "xeyes -display :1" to run things inside it.
Can you imagine the deafeningly loud outcry, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that would surely follow any attempt by Google to selectively censor search results for competitors or their products?

I think this is one of those times when "don't be evil" is conveniently the same thing as "build the best (or most profitable) search engine". That Google is not censoring search results says nothing of whether they're "good" or "evil"; it just seems like a smart business move.
We could have had that energy revolution decades ago, but we threw it away. :) Hopefully there will be no such mistake made with solar, et al.
Steven Novella on Low Carb Diets
Google gets a lot of criticism (often deserved), but it’s worth taking a moment to think of all the things they haven’t done. If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.

Oh please. This is so weak that it's laughable. First, Google hasn't always had this much market share in search and the other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors. Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows. They didn't ban other browsers. Yeah, IE might have been more tightly integrated, but please explain how this is different from the incestuous pile of Google products that promote Google search at every turn?

Instead of glossing over how Google gets some criticism and then beating your anti-Microsoft strawman, maybe we should take a look at some of the questionable things Google has done (China).

It'd be nice if I was wrong, but in my opinion, Google isn't some special orgy of love and kindness towards humankind. It's a multi-billion dollar company with millions of shareholders and it'll do whatever it thinks is best for turning a profit. If that happens to be stuff that isn't "evil", so much the better. If not (China), so be it.

Let's revisit when Google is as old as Microsoft or Disney or News Corp. is now and see how it all turned out. I'm betting the only difference is that now articles like this will make Google out to be the big bad corporation filled with sociopaths trying to destroy the world.

EDIT: added a closing thought
That was the case with MS at the beginning as well. I switched from the Sinclair Spectrum to a PC with DOS because it was better, and it became even better over time.

If you pay attention you will see that Google, just like MS, is making an effort to be better than its competitors in order to disrupt and dominate their markets. Where there are no competitors, Google is letting its products languish. If they end up a virtual monopoly for the main markets, they won't be much different than MS.
That is totally false. There are no restrictions of any kind on the Microsoft network in general (apart from your standard virus/malware/firewall type stuff).

I've synced code for my projects from sourceforge/google code/github often.
The other link shorteners don't have access to your email, to your search history, to your phone, to the places you look up on the internet, etc...
Spinvox close to $150 million exit to Nuance? Not so fast
No. I'm a big fan of RED, and commend them to the study of anyone interested in hardware hacking to commercial ends, but what they (and others) are doing is making high-quality digital image acquisition affordable. The actual photography part is fundamentally the same as with any film camera.

Almost all 3d work made up to now has consisted of taking two good cameras and mounting them next to each other, then setting up the motors and lenses such that they operate perfectly in parallel. Cameron's key innovation is alter the viewing angle (interaxial distance) between the two lenses dynamically while preserving sufficiently good ergonomics to make it work on a set (rather than inside a lab). So this is a new approach to to the optical part of photography, rather than the recording substrate. Of course, this can and probably will be leveraged on behalf of Red camera users and others small enough to be mounted side-by-side on an adjustable platform.

Here's a good article about it: http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4...
Real estate isn't quite as simple as just the listing ads. There are tons of things a real estate agent can be good at that make their ad quality irrelevant.
http://www.followsteph.com/2008/08/03/why-have-a-start-butto...
my understanding is an object is a particular piece of memory, structured according to a class which may be seen as the abstract data type for that particular piece of data. As far as I understand the JVM, the compiler doesn't replicate function bodies for every instance of a class. I think a more appropriate title to this article would be... "protocols and datatypes in clojure", of course I wouldn't have read the article if that were the title...
Just the add something here. I used to look older than I was and part of that I put down to stessful, long-hours of work and eating bad food. I met a nutritionist who recommended that I only eat really healthy foods (no time to go into that right now!) as well as to try yoga. Since then I slowly changed my diet, do yoga a few times a week and meditate daily if possible. I'm often told that I look ten years younger now.
I had not heard before how much nationalist myths (recently very influential in politics in India) had influenced entries in English-language publications such as Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that there is utterly no manuscript or epigraphic evidence for what you have said in your comment. The method of history is to work from written records. (Archeology wouldn't support what you said either.) But thanks for letting me know, by pointing to examples, that currently quick Google searches for facts on the history of India are even less reliable than searches for facts on the history of China.

After edit: remember, as the thread is structured, you were the first to claim that peoples more ancient than those of ancient Greece "already knew that physical exercise leads to good health." That was your statement. You linked to pages that people can Google up, but you haven't yet pointed to any primary source for that proposition of undisputed date and provenance. On the one hand, I can accept as a general proposition that human beings for as long as Homo sapiens has been around had an intuition based on anecdotal experience that keeping moving preserves health (and helps catch tasty animals to eat), but on the other hand the epidemiologist mentioned in the article opening this thread really did discover a NEW, more detailed, epidemiological observation, which has been confirmed through multiple channels through physiological experiments in both animal and human subjects.
iirc, squatting is the best position for humans for this activity.

(You can probably work out why; something to do with the lack of toilets at some point in history)
It can't work for a simple reason: you can't make promotions stick. I can name a half-dozen of my colleagues who've been promoted to team lead, discovered that it's a shitty job (this will obviously vary between organizations, but in some cases it involves a lot of responsibility with no authority to actually get stuff done) and returned to being "just" a worker. Then the second- and third-choices get a go and eventually you get to someone who wanted the job, and had in fact been angling for it all along, but that they're willing to do it in return what whatever motivates them (e.g. fancier title) doesn't correlate at all with being any good at it.
Most of the interpretation on these graphs seems like subjective speculation. One thing I think is worth pointing out is that the observation that "C, C++ and Perl projects are significantly more "top-heavy" than those in other languages, with a smaller core of contributors doing more of the work" may be almost entirely explained by the fact that projects in those languages also have a larger median number of contributors. If you postulate that the size of the core group of committers is the same for all languages and projects (in my experience, this number is very close to 1), then projects which attract more occasional contributors will appear more "top-heavy" because the core is a smaller fraction of the total population of contributors.
I see the 14 day trial as a strategic "encouragement" to get users to pay. If I'm two weeks into using this service, have experienced the value it brings, yet have not found a job then I would be more than willing to shell out $9 to continue for a while longer.
Actually, I think Kurzweil is on to something. 2010 looks a lot different to me from 2000, but what's even more interesting is that I perceive the difference between 2000 and 2010 to be greater than the difference between 1990 and 2000. Same for 1980 to 1990. I really think change is accelerating, both in terms of the more quantifiable things like bandwidth and processing power, but also in more qualitative ways, like how we consume information, or how technology is integrated into our daily lives.
A classic!

My favorite part: "unless the cell phone were actually running Mac OS X, which definitely is impossible"

Technically, the iPhone does not run Mac OS X, but still -- seems like John was ruling out any flavor of OS X, which, obviously, the iPhone runs.
I'm assuming you're talking about some kind of atomic file-or-block-level backup such as LVM snapshots? Large files such as databases can change while reading them over a long period of time, so a standard disk image or file copy wouldn't be reliable for a live system.
Good questions.

I would think that if they are making money with AWS then they will keep buying more servers.

I usually trust S3 for backups and restores but periodically back my own data off of AWS to local storage.

I expect both Amazon and Google infrastructure services to experience outages from time to time. However, they have far more resources and expertise than I do to provide scalable services for a low cost.
Yes, in many ways, Jeff 'took one for the team' in a big way, in that he reminded a lot of people to "Er...I'll just check my backups and make sure they're working."

We're tech types, but e.g. I know a programmer who never backed up his laptop (with important stuff) because he'd never had a hard drive go bad on him. You'll never guess what happened...

The hard part is getting 'normal' people to back up. It's really hard. They have all their data/documents on that laptop, and all the digital photographs from the first 18 months of their baby's life or whatever, but if you advise them to back up, you sound like some crazy lady who throws cats at people in the street.
In most cases, the name probably doesn't matter too much. If the content posted adds value and the particular social network entity is linked prominently, people will likely follow/friend it regardless.

With this app, things were a bit hairier because the name of the twitter game was '@libs', so just saying the name of the game in a tweet could lead users astray. Certainly, constraints such as this should be taken into consideration before deciding on a name.
How to Create a Global Phenomenon for Less Than $10,000
Dave Beazley's Python Concurrency Workshop (Reprise)
Clojure is exactly the kind of Lisp I want: a usable one.

I donated $100, and I'll do so again in January.
This is a little too sycophantic. Both Google and other firms want their products to succeed, which means an increase in market share, or an "Alexander the great" share of the market, if you will.

Both Google and other firms believe they are bringing value to the market. It's hard to believe Rupert Murdoch, for example, believes his companies bring nothing of value. You may not like what he produces, but it's hard to accept he doesn't in some way, and his customers certainly do.

It's pleasing to believe Google is full of salt o' the earth types out to make the world a better place, and Newscorp, for example, and its like is full of evil men and women--but this is a picture far too black and white to be taken seriously.

Essentially assuming two giant companies are so different to the extent that one wishes to make people lives happier, and has the success of the business as a second priority, and the other is inversed seems very fantastical, and without evidence.
I was thinking about making a set up where my S3 backups are automatically mirrored to rackspace or something like that. That would be a really neat setup.
Facebook jumps into the short URL space with fb.me
Flex 4 vs. FlashDevelop 3
Microsoft also contract out a LOT of work, where this practice is not upheld, or even mentioned. I used to work for a place that did work for Microsoft. Big, important stuff as well.