skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Albini doesn't reference the Satellite Home Viewing Act 1999 though. That bit of Courtney's rant is interesting. Also the reason why this article doesn't appear on her own site anymore is interesting.

It's all interesting stuff and this is an area where there is limited information. Read both!
Ask HN: What to do with 1 hour per day?
Hi, after reading some productivity blogs I realize how much I can improve myself spending 1 hour per day in an activity.

In a normal day, I usually have the following activities: programming(Python/Django), sports(tennis, running), studying.

I was thinking about the best activity in which I would invest my extra time, the activity must be something that I could catch up right away and learn/make something useful.

I want to increase my problem solving skills and I think some course like SICP could be a good idea but I don't know if I would like to consider another options.

Thank you for your time.
I can't imagine how you go about getting a divorce in a country with no gov't and thus no court. Do you draw a line in the sand and say everything on this side is mine?
You missed the bit where he points out that 90% that Warner take off the CD sales are not deducted from the advance. In his figures Warner only had to sell 15,000 of each CD to break even (which the author seems to suggest they did). At this point the band will still be in the red with the label but the label wont be in the red with the band.
Air circulation is essential to efficient and comfortable heating with any heat source. However it's done, it must be or heat will pool at the ceiling. You're right if lighting is done at ceiling level. Table lamps, though, create some convected air.
This is not a very informative news article, but I did some research and here's what I think is happening: Google has always required that indexed sites show the indexed content to visitors that come through Google (to prevent bait-and-switch tactics). They're now allowing indexed sites to use bait-and-switch tactics after the fifth visit in one day.

This actually seems like it will have some noticeable (unintended) effects: won't it apply equally to Experts Exchange and their ilk?

(It's not clear what this all has to do with "First Click Free", which is an old program that seems to offer a smaller loophole in the "no bait-and-switch" rules. It's easiest to explain by example: If you go to a WSJ story via google, then click a link to another story, WSJ may ask you to register without being penalized by Google, even if that link didn't lead to a registration wall to the googlebot.)
Camarades.com was funded from a software licensing scheme that brought in about 700,000 annually. In one year all the licensing income was spent on salaries for employees we hired and bandwidth (which was very expensive back then), the second year the business became profitable when we added 24x7 media advertising.

The licensing deal was abolished and the licensed software became completely free as long as people would host their video streams with us.

After that the whole thing was spun out as a different company underneath the parent, and extra shareholders came on board.

All told I figure about a million went in to it before it was really profitable, because it was launched off an existing stream of income we had in that sense a relatively easy time of it. It definitely is a lot of money to spend on something you are not sure is going to take off though, fortunately it did.
The ransom amount is minute compared to the value of the goods on board. It's gotten to the point where it's a regular business. You don't expect or assume they will start randomly gunning people down. Just pay the money and get the hell outta there.

I also assume the pirates sort of know what they are looking for. It's pretty obvious which ships are armed navies and which aren't. Private companies aren't allowed to level a city unless the management want to be dragged down to the Hague for some 'splaining.

And any cargo that is worth defending (nuclear, weapons, etc.) can hire mercenaries like Blackwater.
Why not use your German-ness to your advantage? How about www.crowdmasse.com ?? Masse is an ok word for english speakers because we have "mass" and "masses" so we can 'say' it in our heads without trouble.
I rather pay for BBC than any US based News source. I want news not a liberal or conservative or neutral interpretation of the source, let me be the judge of what I want to conclude from the news. Just give me the facts.

BBC seems to do that more often than others.
Grokking the Goodness of MapReduce and SPDY
The problem becomes a paradox when you consider birds.

Bird bones are much smaller and less dense than ours. Then you must consider that a bird can already fly, which means that the airplane is not a necessity for them.

In my humble opinion, in light of the prior facts, I do not subscribe to the belief that bone attributes are a reliable means of determining airplane fare.

Or rather, I propose the use of volume, instead.
I didn't miss that bit.

That 90-10% repayment split is part of the contract agreement he made with WB. If it isn't he can sue WB.

---

Other world examples: When one pays off a mortgage, you need to pay both for the interest portion as well as the consideration portion.

That can vary over time. First you are paying off interest, later a mix.

Again very clearly a contract term and not morally wrong.
Not that they shouldn't fix the apostrophe, but, and I'm writing this as a compliment to the team vs a rebuttal to your grammatical complaint; the entire dev team is in Uruguay and all speak nearly perfect English; not a single one is a native English speaker... i for one am impressed and humbled by their total grasp of the language as i try to learn Spanish...
Review: Zeo Personal Sleep Coach
This is exactly the gem I was looking for. I had my own implementation of it http://github.com/snitko/cssdryer2 but this one is obviously so much better. Thanks for the link.
I can certainly see that would solve the weight issue.

But that still leaves the problem of size - that guy clearly doesn't fit in a seat.
Python's optional arguments feature is useful for these kinds of polymorphic usages - and I miss them every time I program in other languages (especially Java). In JavaScript I miss named arguments (e.g. def fun(name, age, gender=1, height=None)), which is very useful especially if one calls stuff like Person("Bob", 13, height=150).

Generally, I don't think these kind of improvements are appreciated in C# as they are polymorphic and make it much harder for the compiler.

The optional arguments feature is to define a function like def fun(..., **kw)
Seconded. Just the idea of mentioning twitter in this context inflicts almost physical pain on me.

Knuth is regarded by many as an Einstein-like figure in Computer Science. How that remotely relates to a web-company is beyond me.
That approach didn't really work out in the dotcom era. Of course, in some cases it would make greater turnout, but it is an expensive experiment.
does it give out less pennies for foreign students?
The financial statement seems to be printed... on a matrix printer! It looks very 80's to me.
Underwater Digital Cameras| Best Value Digital Camera
If the Tories win the next UK election (they probably will), it's been suggested that as part of a deal they've done with Rupert Murdoch, they may destroy the BBC new website, or at least castrate it severely, so Murdoch can make more profits.
The excerpt is in fact from the essay (I'd know, it's right here in the dead tree version)
Spanish courses in Spain
Reminds me that I had registered "krautsourcing.com" for a while, but never got round to doing something with it. It was more intended to make fun of the crowd sourcing movement (and I am also German).
Search Engine Optimization India
You don't get it. Why does WB deserve to earn any money from sales, if they don't put in a single cent of their own? Every cent they put in, they charge to the artists. So why do they deserve to make any money at all?

Sure, it's in the contact. But it's morally wrong.
I'm still spending, altought it's more of time and energy, so far probaly >1000 $, I won't count my time I hope to break-even in January 2010.I will post it here.
if your doing it by mass, this will also effect the tall amongst us.

Being well over 6ft means that i'm naturally heavier than a 5ft something and generally struggle to fit within average size seating on aircraft. My issue is that of length rather than width.

I do what I can by getting an aisle seat, but its not exactly comfortable having knees wedged under my chin as the gap between seats as tiny and upgrades arent cheap.

Should you really penalize people because of their genetics?
> Kimo's high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” - that the system is designed so anyone can keep up.

If your IQ is off the charts, maybe. Try studying chemistry sometime. There the standard pace is to weed as many as you out in the first few semesters as they can. The women are the first to go.
Around 10K€ or $15K in USD.
> I want to increase my problem solving skills

Try these if you haven't
http://projecteuler.net/
http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
It is rather blunt to assume so. Nearly every week we discuss whether Google can be defeated. Yet, you think that Craigslist cannot?

My point is that their closeness will be major factor in their failure.

EDIT: I don't buy Craigslist hype. To me, their service is poor. Outside the US, especially in the East Europe, there's a lot of better alternatives. There was a lot of discussions why they succeed. I point out how they're likely to fail.
I genuinely thought that I would be clicking through to an insightful post about how many crappy web-based "business productivity" apps that try and go the 37signals/Fogcreek route to success, and why the glut in this market helps no-one. Shame.
LOL! Lecturing me on "not getting it" is not a nice or effective tactic.

--

WB put in advance money to make the albums in the first place. Nothing morally wrong there.

Further, lets say that 90% fee on current sales goes into the pool of money for signing new bands who might be successful. Nothing morally wrong there.

WB does not necessarily blow it all on Cocaine binges and executive Porsches.
The World's Most Extreme and Dangerous Roads
Its that time of year when the weather turns bad and the roads can become a dangerous place with rain, snow and ice. With this in mind it got us thinking of some of the most dangerous and extreme roads around the globe. Here are a few that we picked that stand out as roads to avoid when the weather turns bad!
You seem to miss the difference between "legal" and "morally defensible". Sure, bands with no knowledge of business or law (most of them) can sign horrific contracts tremendously skewed toward the advantage of the record labels, all perfectly legal. But that doesn't make it right.
I already pay for the BBC, at about £38/3months, I don't use my television for anything but video games, so if they take away the BBC News site, I will be very angry.
They can try, anything like that would have to get past the lords, and I doubt they'd be willing to castrate the BBC like that, certainly not to line a foreigner's pockets some more.
Assuming royalties are often incorrectly calculated, what's the likelihood that the innaccuracies are almost always in the favour of the record company? I suspect very likely indeed, and IMO it constitutes fraud.

When record companies deprive artists of income through misaccounting, they should be charged with copyright infringement, and fined at the same high rate per copy that they have bribed legisltors to apply when others infringe copyright. And if that means they go bankrupt, it's no more than they deserve.
Large parts of Somalia are governed by local Muslim groups. While divorce is not common in Islam and is generally condemned, it is possible in certain circumstances none the less. I imagine that the local religious leader can arrange a divorce, according to the Shari'ah.
I seriously believe that the "weight allowance" should be the sum of your weight, check-in and carry-on baggages. Do the math, that is the total weight of what's on the plane on "your ticket" and correlates to the amount of fuel consumed. I remember getting past the baggage limit by filling my carry-on to the point it was heavier than my check-in (I spent the money I had saved on the back when I went to the doctor the next week).

I'm actually looking at this from the airlines point of view but then again, obesity is not crime and I am sure some fat guy is going to sue the airlines when they implement this.

Could be the solution to the "obesity problem" :-)
It's not about caring .. It's about how you want to experience the internet.

Would you rather have clear, readable content or be besieged by advertising ..

On sites target devs you should really expect very high % to be using ad blockers ... I'm yet to meet a single dev that doesn't use it in some form.

(edit: I didn't even realise it was ad supported for that reason .. still think its a good service though )
Should you really penalize people because of their genetics?

You're already rewarded based on your genetics. (You can afford to fly more if you're genetically smart, and not, say, genetically a squirrel.) And since weight imposes a cost, it's just a question of whether that cost is borne by the people who cause it (heavy people who choose to fly) or by everyone.
The Herd Instinct
Diamond Wedding Bands, Mens Wedding Bands, Designer Engagement Rings @ Sky Facet
Does Behavioral Economics Matter?
First Click Free. Meaningless sop to whining publishers or did Google flinch?
Don't be so naive. A "social contract" can only exist if there's a large enough middle class, which is something Somalia (and East Africa in general) lacks. Unfortunately a more likely outcome will be the emergence of a few local warlords and a particularly bloody tribal war and a total humanitarian disaster.

Don't forget that things have changed since the creation of "social contracts" in modern Western nations; genocide is a lot cheaper and simpler to execute than it used to be. These days all you need is to put four men equipped with cheap Russian-made machine guns into a jeep and they will exterminate a dozen villages in the course of an afternoon without breaking a sweat.
Control versus Influence, the problem with Corporations
What Does 350M Facebook Users Mean? Tech
You might like "Masters of Doom".
Breast Cancer - A Blessing in Disguise
Thank example show only two, but the text seems to say you can do more.
Flot requires excanvas.js to simulate the canvas in IE. Internally excanvas.js uses VML.
Yep, they can. Know why? Because Agents with the Google codename get free access to subscription services. Why would this happen? Because Newspapers want to get fucking indexed and search traffic.

In fact there's a ff plugin out there that lets you change your user agent id to that of google's bot. Lets you see free articles, porn, etc. But mostly porn.
Cosmetic Surgery Procedures
What about this one:

6 points by pierrefar 2 hours ago | link

The numbers are scary: WB claims to be $300k out but they're not accounting for a sizable revenue stream. The post mentions the band earned $12k in 5 years from albums they control, and they expected the albums WB control to earn 2-5X more. Assume 5x$12, and you'll get closer to $200k.

Do that over quite a few years, and they'll end up owing the band money while the band members are alive. Keep telling them $62 over five years and they'll never ever need to write them a cheque.

How is this not pure and simple theft?
That's a engineery solution, sure, but I think it'd come out just about even if people had to purchase multiple seats for themselves, which I think is perfectly fair.
What was this don't be evil thing again? So who will build a news-only search engine with deep links, maybe a distributed effort?
It's actually a good idea. Want to save $10 on your flight? Use my 5-minute ABS program!

Then again, if it were a democracy, this idea probably wouldn't fly because there's more fat people than skinny ones in middle america.
"So, the labels charge the bands for everything they do for them? So why do they then also take 90% of the income?"

Because, as the article explains, many bands (presumably most of them) never pay back what the label invested. If TMJ never earns them a penny, they have to cover their losses with those who do.
Big people have to eat more too, so they spend more on food. Isn't that penalizing people based on their size too?

There is a plus side though, if you have a family with small kids, the cost of the flight might only come out to be a 2-person cost.
Google Reconciliatory note - The Murdoch Effect
C# 4 has exactly this feature.
Because they singed a contract stating that advances are to come out of their share of the profits.

It sucks but that's how it has worked and sometimes still works for artists although a lot of them are wise to this game.
Even worse, they put Southampton in the "Portsmouth" group.
Being “Busy” Is a Lazy Way to be Productive
As the copyright extensions and DMCA demonstrate, the big media companies own the gov't. It's not theft if it's legal, and it's not illegal if the gov't won't prosecute.
Except with incandescent bulbs banned in the EU, there's now a strong economic incentive to build cheap, good and efficient replacements. Mind you, I'm not sure banning them outright is the way I'd have done it. (I'd have taxed the environmental impact per amount of light emitted and lifetime)
Repeat after me: Chrome OS is strategically designed to be made around a browser and not look remotely like a regular desktop. Google never took into consideration regular remote desktop applications, hence this is a moot topic and a fairly useless article.
Some people go negative. However, the average is so heavily influenced by a few people making 100+$/h or 10,000+$/h. It's not really worth looking at. I would suggest consider looking for the bottom 10 percentile the middle 50 percentile and the top 10 percentile.
-More developer mindshare.
-More available drivers.
-Higher performance overall.
-Proven technology on netbooks.

Although the choice of kernel and base OSes is fairly irrelevant for a product like ChromeOS, Linux is the de facto FOSS kernel and the choice by default.
The 'red' cones alone can't tell the difference between orange and brick red. The idea is to stimulate all 3 types of cones and the rods in the same proportion as daylight does. RGB LEDs should have the cones covered; I wonder if the problem are the rods? Do we need 4-component LEDs?
Too bad. I guess we'll just reinvent the wheel again simply because we don't like who invented it last time.
Thanks. I hadn't seen this behavior for years so you have confirmed they still do it. Secondly, Google did not behave this way every time (in fact, rarely), so not noticing this in the new version doesn't mean Google no longer does this.
MS has made huge strides toward this w/Silverlight. You can run C# directly in the browser, and last I looked (admittedly some time ago), the performance trumped JS in the browser by several orders of magnitude.
By "big boned" you mean fat, right?
What is it with lecturing me about missing stuff...???

Come on. I have a different viewpoint. I happen to think it is completely "morally defensible" thank you.

---

One of my best mates at University (in Sydney) graduated in Law and set up business helping unsigned Bands on equitable terms for low fees.

Unfortunately for him, there were not enough bands who sought his low-cost, equitable contracts. They preferred the expensive, "morally-indefensible" contracts with terrible terms.

My friend is now a primrary school-teacher and enjoying life a lot more.

What do you have to say about that? Or will you just say I'm "missing something"? or "you don't get it"
According to the article TMJ probably earned the label back all the money they lent them, but from a different revenue stream. The loan doesn't get paid back from all the money the band generates, but from a small percentage of it.

Let us say that an album sale makes $6 for the label and $3 for the band, then the label first takes the $6 and then also takes the $3 to pay down the advance. So even though that album sale in effect gave the label $9 in revenue, they only decreased the loan by $3. So in this example the losses from a 90k$ advance will be completely recovered after 10k sales, but the band will still 'owe' the label until they've made 30k sales. So just because a band still 'owes' a label hundreds of thousands of dollars, that does not mean that the label lost that money.
"Everything you wrote could have been used as a defense of IE6."

Well ... that's how we have Firefox now isn't it ? I mean people went ahead and built something better.
Surviving Prostate Cancer Is Easier With Adequate Treatment
The Agile missing point and the Waterfall Illusion.
Willy's Own SOA Manifesto
Sounds more like a court case with WB and not a blog post whinging about the terms. HN Post calculations are worth the paper they're written on.

If anyone is owed multiple $100K, for any reason, there should be motivation to hire a legal team to ask for it. Those sorts of cases happen successfully all the time, and the band guy should start his own action.

But he'd need to be nursing circa $500K loss for him to be $100K in credit by the time the settlement was awarded
Flexible, self-healing antennae made from liquid metal
Role of Permanent Links in website rankings
You must have heard Link builders talking about permanent links quite often and wondering why everyone asks about permanent links when it comes to Building Links?
So, Google gives publishers finer-grained control over how their readers can access their content via Google's services. They do it because the newspapers are getting desperate in their quest to find a working revenue model and seem likely to try drastic measures, like unlisting themselves from Google (which any site can do using robots.txt).
Doesn't the FT already do this ? - I'm failing to see what Google has to do with this. Some newspapers already send you a cookie and only let you see a certain number of articles before giving you a paywall.
Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support
Investigate the -mno-cygwin option for gcc.
they got special permission from craigslist
I know I'm probably the odd one out here, but I think this is a good thing. Newspapers have been arguing that they aren't getting paid enough for the service they provide and a lot of internet users are arguing that the service they provide have too little value to be worth paying for. Anything that can help bring these warring factions to some sort of actual confrontation can only be a good thing in the long run.

We've seen too much hand wringing and rhetoric and not enough action. Big media, you say internet users have been freeloading for too long, here are the tools to stop them, now use them. Internet users, you say you can do without access to major newspaper content, they've now limited your free access, so go do without.

I honestly don't know how it will play out in the end, but I'm pretty sure we'll see the future of news media rise from the ashes of the conflict, and I'm genuinely excited to see what it looks like.
Really all this is going to achieve is to drive readers away from conventional news sources to less conventional ones. Google doesn't control ads on most Murdoch media sites, but it does control ads on many blogs. Potentially Google could make more money by having people spending time reading news related blogs and less time on other news sites.
Why does Turkish startup Sanalika feature on Google Zeitgeist 2009?
I thought the point was that readability is important. There's a difference between one's willingness and ability to learn a new language and read code written in it and what is a good idea to foist upon the many others who will read, extend, and maintain that code.

If you are building a system that you can't develop and maintain by yourself, you have to think about what other people will "struggle with".