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dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works

Interesting issue. I wonder if it would be possible for a country to set up an extremely long copyright term (with a huge administrative fee) that would have to be respected under US law (and other adopters of the treaty).

I'm sure many music/movie studios and authors would gladly pay $100K to copyright each of their works internationally for 500 years...

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Poll: Do you think HN should go dark in protest of SOPA?

We should also consider the media message we'd be sending to the uninformed. A site called Hacker News opposes SOPA; what do you think the average person's response to that would be?

Frankly I think that HN is the wrong vehicle to bring attention to the matter strictly from a marketing/outreach perspective.

However, YC is a great channel to carry this message, and PG has already taken a very public stance on the issue.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: 4Clojure hits 100K solved problems.

Stop by #4clojure on freenode, the site devs hang out there (myself included) and happily give pointers on problems. Also, the main #clojure channel, while busy, is a great resource -- Clojure has a pretty welcoming community.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: China to cancel college majors that don't pay

I think that's backwards. Make Science/Engineering cheaper and liberal arts more expensive... arts degrees should be considered luxury items: nice to have but not strictly necessary. I think many people would be better off not going to University than get an arts degree, whereas there is huge societal benefit to pushing out more scientists and engineers.

Liberal arts should exist, just at a much smaller (frankly, more reasonable wrt actual demand) scale.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: John McCarthy Has Died

He has a string of accomplishments that still live on in active development... and he made it to 84. That's a good run.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: My public YC application, open to any feedback

The tricky thing is that project management is a very mature industry, so saying that I'm going to build a badass PM tool says even less -- my thought was to focus on the reason for building the tool. My take is that project management in the software space fails because the stacks of tools companies use are rarely interoperable. Efficiency and predictability are hugely dependent on a tight coupling between the different phases of software dev -- and that's where there's still huge amounts of room to innovate.

I hear what you're saying, I just don't know how to rephrase that question to focus on what's innovative...

edit: just to be clear, I think you're right. I'm going to takle this this all day to try to make it clearer. Thanks.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: My public YC application, open to any feedback

I've been refining this application for the past few weeks -- but I'm always looking for any feedback I can get. Let me know if you think I should make any last-minute changes (or even what you liked/disliked about it).

Just a reminder that applications are due in tonight. Good luck to everyone!

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Poll: Facebook usage

You're right that sucks. But if you think about it it's probably more of a technical issue than evil policy, just imagine the permission graph for visiting one of your friend's profiles -- FB would have to do a reverse lookup of all of you friend's friends and filter ones with closed photo sharing (or what if you are a friend common to both?). Further, scaling that out to 750M people is non-trivial.

Anyways, I'm not excusing their policy, but I expect they'll fix it whenever it is technically possible to do so.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: NYC Startup Paying $350 a Month in Manhattan for 1500sqft Apartment

From story:

- Lease a 4 bed apartment, get better rates by paying full year of rent in advance (not easy for most people).

- Sublet the 3 remaining rooms at near market rate.

- Accept the risk of default and/or not finding tenants.

What you really get for 350$ is a single room in a big apartment. Still a good deal, but there are substantial risks and lots of upfront investment. Like picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer, it'll work out for the better... most of the time.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Clojure 1.3 Released

You can now also follow other users and see their solutions... not always idiomatic (esp with the code golfers) but it still gives great insight to different ways to solve problems. Also, its not just for beginners, there are some genuinely hard problems on there.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Culture inside Bing

Anyone have a link to the study referenced in here which says people prefer bing results to google's when logos are reversed? This seems like something MSFT's marketing department would be trumpeting at every opportunity...

EDIT: The closest I've found is this - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ which lets users vote up anonymous result sets. However, the last reported numbers (from 2009) show Google in the lead. Oh well.

dreamux | 14 years ago | on: Facebook puts off IPO until late 2012

Groupon probably damaged software IPO sentiment, and people want to see how Google+ will play out. Also, they don't really need the cash and waiting will allow them to build a consistent revenue history (which will probably be disclosed, along SEC rules of 500+ investors). They can wait this one out.
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