skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever definition of "ownership" you want to work with, you can come up with a grant of rights that equates to it, and a reasonable argument that people should be able to trade those rights for something more valuable to them.

So, in other words, I have no idea what your point is.
Ask HN: Simplest tool to build a web app
My friend wanted to build a light weight web app with a database as back end. Should be easy to maintain and host. Core of it should be immune to SQL Injections, XSS and DOS attacks. mostly it will be used with in a organization.
The comments on the site are ... pleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a blog post where the author admits to having some personal flaw where the first 10 comments aren't "HAH UR DUM". Looks like the Chronicle attracts slightly more intelligent readers than the average blog.
That's what I'd like to know - how LITTLE does an assistant professor make that 60,000 dollars of debt will take a lifetime to pay off, even in the absence of a mortgage (and presumably a car) payment?
I frequently try becoming a internet fugitive for periods of time, but its long arms eventually capture me again. I believe being in the middle of the ocean would certainly liberate me for a prolonged period of time, however so would going into cottage country in a tent . . . although there is considerably less bears at sea (note that there still is technically a fair amount due to Polar Bears being on ice in mid ocean, hence 'considerably less' and not 'no').

Internet access is both a curse and a blessing, however it tends to lean more towards the former rather than the heavy lean towards the latter that everyone desires.
> does anyone with a real technical background... this believe this stuff?

Why not?
I think the Black Team's longevity had more to do with the corporate reality of its time. Corporations in the 60s and 70s still valued investment that provided benefits over the long term. So shipping quality was still important.

Corporations today are worried only about the next quarter, or what things will look like maybe twelve to eighteen months down the line. But certainly no further than when the options vest and management exits.

And that's why divisions don't help. Because defeating the process to ship crap today has a better effect on this and next quarter's P&L, versus increased spending testing/refining the project for no real increase in revenue in the short term.

Down the line, when product quality would become known and helping the product sell better than it would otherwise, those responsible for making the decisions will likely be gone.
(They'll definitely have planned on being gone by then.)
Article behind paywall, and Google alternative is down. What a useless link!
Pushing (Promoting your Project)
Lexical scoping, for instance. GENSYMs. Environments. And aside from lacking these essentials, there is a whole zoo of weird warts and misfeatures added on.

NewLisp is an abomination from the standpoint of any but the most untutored Lisp user. Don't let the word "new" deceive you. NewLisp is a throwback to the past, a fanatically-hyped (mainly in Lisp forums) product of aggressive, conquering ignorance.
A gender imbalance is NORMAL. The United States has surplus of 1.3 million men age 0-14. It's not really a problem because men die young or single all the time. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

USA Age structure:
0-14 years: 20.2% (male 31,639,127/female 30,305,704)
15-64 years: 67% (male 102,665,043/female 103,129,321)
65 years and over: 12.8% (male 16,901,232/female 22,571,696) (2009 est.)
Sex ratio:
*at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female*
under 15 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.75 male(s)/female
total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

China Age structure:
0-14 years: 19.8% (male 140,877,745/female 124,290,090)
15-64 years: 72.1% (male 495,724,889/female 469,182,087)
65 years and over: 8.1% (male 51,774,115/female 56,764,042) (2009 est.)
Sex ratio:
*at birth: 1.1 male(s)/female*
under 15 years: 1.13 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.91 male(s)/female
total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

India:
Age structure:
0-14 years: 31.1% (male 190,075,426/female 172,799,553)
15-64 years: 63.6% (male 381,446,079/female 359,802,209)
65 years and over: 5.3% (male 29,364,920/female 32,591,030) (2009 est.)
Sex ratio:
*at birth: 1.12 male(s)/female*
under 15 years: 1.1 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.9 male(s)/female
total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

China's surplus might be 50% larger than normal, but it's still less than india and not all that far from normal.
Twitter Crows About Chirp, Its Official Developer Conference
Ask HN: Please Review My Project (JS Game Engine)
Hi Everyone,

This is the first time that I've submitted anything here, but I lurk and read HN daily. My partner Joe and I just launched a suite of tools for building 2D web games with pure JavaScript and we'd really love your feedback.

http://www.effectgames.com

Briefly: we're a web developer and designer who are both very heavily into video games. While trying to avoid any negativity around Flash, we thought standard and open web tech would be a better basis for creating games (plus we're more familiar with JavaScript).

We have been working on this off and on for over four years, and now we're ready to release the "Effect Engine" -- a pure JavaScript / DHTML framework for displaying and animating game graphics, playing sounds & music, handling keyboard & mouse, and performing sprite collision detection. It smoothly renders multiple layers of parallax scrolling tiles and sprites without requiring Canvas or SVG (so it plays nicely with all modern browsers).

Right now, we're working on expanding some of the available game demos to full blown titles (for example: http://www.effectgames.com/effect/games/crystalgalaxy/1.0b), but that doesn't mean that the engine is done.

We're planning on launching a slew of new features in the coming months, but we've gotten to a point where we'd really appreciate some feedback for improving Effect.

As excited as we are about finally getting to create the games that we've had in our heads for years, we're even more excited to see what our friends on HN can do!

Min and Joe
Geo is on: Gowalla Raises $8.4M
Have you ever been on board a containership? It's insanely optimized for cargo capacity. It's not like they could just make a little room for passengers.
How long is a piece of string?

Seriously though I would say PHP plus MySQL and Memcache for scaling. With a reasonably modern framework like Kohana PHP you can build stuff pretty quickly on dirt cheap, no brainer hardware. :)

As to XSS/DOS etc. that is down to your code and to the server setup - somewhat difficult.
Turns out 'weenis' isn't sexual at all. But yes, the name calling is a huge distraction.
clicky link :)
http://www.effectgames.com
None of those present god (little g) level AI being created by humans but, AI (2001) is fairly close to the idea. By the end of the movie the robots knew how to bring someone back from the dead for a day and who knows what else.
How do they know that the players are actually writing letters? How do they know they don't just click "Yeah, sure, I wrote it. Now, where's my [virtual currency]?"

I suspect the number of people doing this would rather dwarf the number of people who actually bother to write letters.
I found some documentation online about several policies surrounding this: http://www.pitt.edu/~offres/policyu.html

It's not really an easy read, but it seems that, by default, the University wants in on anything you do in their facilities. They make this condition for students, though:

"Students are exempt from this policy for cases in which University facilities are not used and where the invention or discovery is not made in the course of the students studies at the University."

So since it's sort of "in the course of the student's studies", I might have to go after the following conditions in the policy:

" If, however, the inventor or another institution believes that the circumstances surrounding the invention, including such factors as support provided by other than the University, place where discovery was made, or lack of relevance to the regular work of the member of the faculty or staff, warrant another distribution, the inventor or the institution may request the Office of Technology Management, in consultation with the Technology Transfer Committee, to review the circumstances. After review, and upon consultation with the Office of General Counsel and the Senior Vice Chancellors, the Office of Technology Management will make recommendations to the Chancellor on the distribution of proceeds.

The University, as determined by the Technology Transfer Committee and the Office of Technology Management, may choose to waive all rights to file a patent on a particular invention or to pursue licensing of such invention, electing instead to grant the inventor permission to proceed on his or her own in whatever manner the inventor deemsappropriate."

Most of the language seems really targeted towards faculty and staff, however, so I think I can work around it. I'll try the person you suggested once I hear back from my department head.
Graduate school has a number of extremely important advantages over independent research, at least when you're getting started:
1. Mentorship.
2. Easy access to the rest of the research community.
3. Access to resources: libraries, journal subscriptions, and, most importantly, funding.
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> product of aggressive, conquering ignorance.

That sounds very familiar...

> Lexical scoping

That's what contexts and the 'expand'/'letex' functions are for, and you rarely need to make use of them. Dynamic scope is a good fit for newLISP especially since it's interpreted and not compiled (dynamic scoping is faster).

> Environments

Not sure what you mean, are you referring to a method of grouping code like newLISP's contexts?

> GENSYMs

Uh...

(define (gensym:gensym) (sym (string "gensym-" (inc gensym:counter))))

Overall you haven't mentioned anything significant yet. newLISP is a great language for scripting, I suggest you give it a shot. It has plenty of its own worthwhile innovations as you put it. :-)
From the article:

> Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, "Get Health Reform Right" requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:

> "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have."
The University probably gets the copyright to your code.

There are several ways around that. One is to link to a GPL'd project. Now they own the copyright, but they have to keep the source code available for others to use for any purpose. Including your business. (If in doubt, you can always do something like cut-n-paste Emacs' malloc, link in libreadline, etc.)

Another option is to just rewrite the code. Copyright only covers verbatim redistribution of the literal program text, which is generally not too valuable. It is very easy to write a program a second time. Ideas and algorithms are not copyright-able, after all, nor is the experience in developing software you gained from writing it the first time. Those things are where the value is, and copyright does not protect them. (Software patents may, but the University will have to apply for one before that's even an issue. Then they will have to spend their own money to sue you, and then they will have to collect damages. Not going to happen unless you become the next Google, and if you do, you can afford to pay them off.

OTOH, software patents are almost dead. So this might not be worth worrying about.)

So anyway, to be extra safe, be open source, or just redo anything that you did with University resources. That is a lot faster than dealing with legal problems that may arise if you are successful.

(Then again, most startups fail pretty quickly, so perhaps it's not really worth your time to "care" this time around.)
[citation needed]

Are you related to the project somehow? You seem to be vigorously defending it, but I see no affiliation mentioned (and your profile here is blank).
I've read charles stross's accelrando yesterday. One of the best books about singularity. It's also free (Creative Commons License). Probably the best free ebook I've ever read.
Ask HN: Real Time virtual displays anyone?
Has any one have heard of this term? Do you know any software in this area? All I have is one software SCADE display.
You can try Kohana.
I think the important part is to allow these groups to be self-selecting. In other words, the smartest people should gravitate towards each other if they are allowed to. For a really interesting take on how to do this take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Cul...

I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.
Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.
thesixtyone.com seems to do a really good job of this.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup might be a good starting point ... looks like the average for an assistant professor is around 60k, but Dartmouth is likely to be above that.
posterous is mini-blogging though, of which the only real competition that existed was tumblr.

micro-blogging and full blogging are pretty much over-competed though.
I agree particularly with (1). If your project is 5k lines and you wrote all of it, it ought to still be small enough for you to navigate round it easily (at least, that's my experience based on my projects of that size or bigger).

My other suggestion, regarding point (3) would be to not rely on the IDE to heklp you navigate the code. If it's your code you should really have laid out the classes and source files so things are in a logical (to you) order and easy to find. (I'm currently working on a 12 kline project and my IDE consists of multiple kwrite windows plus the command line -- I find this enough to navigate the code).
There are a large number of assumptions built up around the singularity concept and CPU's are not getting exponentially faster so at least one of them seems incorrect. Honestly, the hardest problem IMO is the idea that intelligence is fungible and twice as much of it will provide anywhere near twice the result. The real world is fuzzy and thinking faster/deeper only get’s you so far.

Let's say we can build a machine smarter than a single person, that’s a long way from building something smarter than humanity so there is not a quick kick off to infinity. Now let's suggest we build a billion of the things and they are all smarter than the average person. Nothing says you can get anything close to a linear feedback between the intelligence designing an AI and how smart the AI is so there would not necessarily be a feedback loop to keep making more intelligent systems. etc.
And the Macintosh project at Apple; complete with pirate flags!
I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.
It looks very interesting!
Many aspects of modern society thoroughly perplex me, specifically the excessive cleanliness exhibited primarily in urban centres.

It's as though someone arbitrarily decided that humans have a limited quantity of immunity from disease, believing that avoiding infection would be beneficial. This asinine notion is best reserved for Intensive Care Units, but is on display in thousands of day cares and homes around the country serving only the purpose of weakening children's immune systems.

By all rights and justification I have no clue how I'm alive. I've been exposed to monster cases of the flu and developed nothing. I've eaten tainted food from restaurants and when everyone I knew who ate the same was trying to figure out how to keep their head in and their ass on the toilet at the same time, I was perfectly fine. I can only assume that eating the cats kibble at 3 years old induced super powers to me.
Is this real science?

I'm all about studies about germs, cleanliness and health, but I lost confidence when I read this:

"The research took advantage of a longitudinal study of Filipinos, following participants in utero through 22 years of age, to get a better understanding of how environments early in life affect C-reactive protein (CRP) production in adulthood."

"The Northwestern researchers were interested in what CRP production looks like in the Philippines, a population with a high level of infectious diseases in early childhood compared to Western countries. Relative to Western countries, the Philippines also has relatively low rates of obesity and cardiovascular diseases, consistent with the Northwestern research findings."

"Blood tests showed that C-reactive protein was at least 80 percent lower for study participants in the Philippines when they reached young adulthood, relative to their American counterparts, though the Filipinos suffered from many more infectious diseases as infants and toddlers."

It sounds like they're assuming that children in the Philippines eat the same foods as Americans, exercise the same amounts, etc.

[edit for clarity]
I'm a college professor myself. It is a thankless job. You spend more than 20 years in school, washing dishes, working at a dead end job waiting for that moment when you finally get to teach.

My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on.

Also realize the pressures of college teaching:

Society needs you to teach skills to the students that they will need to excel. The students have been given a free ride all the way though High School.

How do you teach C programming to students that cannot do any algebra and have no understanding of logic?

If you make the class hard enough for them to excel in the global marketplace, all of the students drop out.

It you make it easy enough for everyone to pass, you have scarcely covered the first one or two chapters of the book.
Strictly speaking, if you make more than that you are better off hiring someone to clean for you.

Realistically, if an hour of free time is worth $25 (and to many people it seems that it is), you should go for it.
I don't think I've made any point yet; I'm mostly fishing for information from people who actually do know things, and trying to figure out if what's on my mind makes any sense. Two possible advantages (for people) of individual ownership of patents over corporate ownership:

Contracts require consideration. If I own something and sign a contract with you that allows you exclusive control over it, then I have to be getting something in return. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that there's some restrictions on consideration that can render a contract void if it is incredibly lopsided. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that a contract exchanging an invention earning billions per year for a five figure salary and a position that can be terminated on a whim might not be a valid contract. I really don't know about that though.

The other nice thing about personal ownership of copyrights and patents is that it makes the whole retroactive copyright extension and post-mortem copyright assignment transparently illegal. If only the creator of a work gets the monopoly over its distribution, then the termination of the creator must entail the termination of the monopoly. I'm very much not a fan of eternal copyright, so that alone would make me a bit happier.

I think I've probably threadjacked this way too far, so I'll just shut up now. Maybe I'll start a blog somewhere where you can rip holes in my half-assed ideas without us bothering anybody else :)
Assistant professors in humanities (even at an Ivy League school) don't make much money.
In the movie, an AI hires Tony Robbins to help her become more human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Robbins

Emotional machines plot? ugh.
Heya felix. It actually IS possible to get several times faster than jQuery in microbenchmarks on specific implementations when you can hit the native version for a path or something your interpreter knows how to optimize. As an example, I did an optimzing pass through underscore.js specifically for node.js, mostly swapping in native calls and switching loops to the idiomatic for(var i =0, ii=x.length, i < ii, i++) since V8 knows how to optimize those. The result is a several times speedup. Native methods are faster than javascript ones. This shouldn't be surprising.

Despite the work being done for node, I wanted to see how it looked on the various browser engines, so I made a pasted together set of screenshots [1] showing the underscore benchmark suite running in Chrome, Firefox 3.5, and a recent Minefield nightly. Results are paired underscore before my tweaks and after.

[1] http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/underscore_perf_benches.gif

I believe the methods all have the same signatures and are operating on the same set of data. jQuery has the disadvantage here of having to work on a variety of interpreters where I only care about v8. The interesting bit is to note the jQuery.map() call on the newer tracemonkey is FASTER than using my for loop. It all depends on what the interpreter can optimize and hitting those paths. I have notes [2] on my optimizations if you're interested in how the various approaches bench on node. I was going for low hanging fruit, so these were done with a simple timing function on the node repl.

[2] http://wiki.github.com/grayrest/underscore/node-conversion-i...
When the article says:

> Zynga has since removed all offers from its games

Does that mean that other games are still participating?
Yes, doing whatever you want regardless of it's commercial viability is a privilege reserved for the affluent.

Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.
according to the chronicle the average assistant professor salary is ~$80k. I doubt that a native american studies assistant professor will get that much but I have been wrong before.

http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&...
Don't know why we have been down-voted but it's true that having a credit card is important when you go to the states.
Massive Jumbo-tron to Display 3D at NFL Game
I've been using Codeigniter - a PHP framework. It's very very well documented -- you have to read the documentation to see how good it is. And the input class is very good at handling most XSS/SQL Injection type attacks.
I only make about $30.00/Hr as a professor of Computer Science.

The colleges don't pay very well and the degree required to get the job is very expensive and time consuming.
I do the same thing with http://osdir.com/ -- it should really be delisted from google. It's nothing but redundant messages available elsewhere plastered with 30 ads that will severely lag or crash your browser.