skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get it. Since when is "They don't provide it in the format I want it" a valid excuse for piracy. (Ethical discussions of piracy aside)

If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards go and pay for it by buying the DVD even if you never watch it.

(If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned argument for it's validity)

(Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to pay, so why not pay?)

Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
What specifically can Hulu do better? The only thing I can think of is dropping ads for paid users.
I know, I can't believe that got published in a magazine like Forbes. Do they even have editors there?
You can, if you make it easy and cheap.

Most people don't know what bittorrent is, and even if they know, they wouldn't know how to use it. And even if they knew that, they couldn't tell legit content from viruses.
Beware showing different squeeze pages based on IP. Google could see that as cloaking.

But good work monetizing a simple site.
Update: Derek McUmber pointed out a good point that IANA actually glues the records of a.usadotgov.net in the root zone via http://www.iana.org/domains/root/tld-change-template.txt so it doesn’t look like as bad of things can happen if in fact the root-servers give out the name servers ips

So basically he just took back everything he wrote before that update.
Like in many fields, 90% of the money goes to 10% of the participants.
Where do you see me waving any flags? I think you should be equally protective of open formats and protocols. Stand up for them. That's all I'm doing donahoe.
They're not even bypassing social conventions. If they were, people would refuse to take the tips. The $20 tip itself is a social convention, even though not talking about it is also a social convention.
My thought is that we can piggyback on Nasa's earlier work on fuels, and since our goal is just to hit a big gravity well (not at a specific point) our mathematical model for trajectory just has to include the earth and the moon.
> Microsoft making Windows fail at multiuser security is not an antitrust problem.

No. That was incompetence.
Only if it wasn't cast as an integer.

I usually do something like:

$id = isset($_GET['id']) ? (int) $_GET['id'] : 0;

It has to be treated as a float to be a problem, not as an int.
Goldman Sachs, Facebook, the SEC and Bubble 2.0
The Elements of Clunk
Yes.

If a human can view it, you can always, always, always copy it, reproduce it, and share it. No matter how much HDCP you throw at it, no matter what specialized hardware you devote to it...in the words of Mr. Universe..."you can't stop the signal."

(And all the King's horses, and all the King's men, couldn't put the industry's shitty paranoid ineffective wannabe DRM back together again.)
Ziff Davis Buys Tech Deals Site LogicBuy; Launches Ad Targeting Platform...
And yet in the U.S. Netflix consumes over twice the bandwidth that Bittorrent does. So either Netflix users use the service a lot more or they download bigger files.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to...

Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.
They are different sides of the same thing -- our websites. One is for looking at things in the browser, and the other is for mashups by software, the kind of stuff people in YCombinatorLand are supposed to savvy about.

What difference does it make how many people directly use RSS feeds. Systems are built around it that flow the news to people in every context. It's how news is distributed on the net.

You guys know all this, but you pretend you don't -- why?
Why should they have a clue about inner workings. Most people also don't know how a car engine works.

My comment isn't that people have an informed opinion about privacy, more that it's a moot point to them. It's like asking them their opinion on a new fuel injection component.

Users rightly assume that their personal details will be kept securely by any website they give them to.

> " Indeed, I suspect that among those who do an informed opinion, very few have deliberately chosen not to use privacy helpers like adblock, noscript, or Tor"

BS. Try using tor for a day. It's useless, ridiculously slow, and means things don't work properly. Also I tried adblock for a day, and I hated it. I want to see the internet uncensored. If a website pisses me off with popup ads, I'll just not go there again. I think that's pretty typical behavior. NoScript is an even stupider idea. Who in their right mind would disable javascript? Pretty much all websites will be broken. The only people who would install noscript are the analy OCD afflicted control freaks.
Spring 2011 Handbags from Marc Jacobs
It should be noted that this is in some way a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485, which is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367.
What's silly or mean about evaluating one(selve)s performance?
Many service companies would love to be product companies. If your automated deployments can be turned into a product, that may be something very valuable to the company. E.g. 37 Signals / Rails.

OTOH, it may be easier for you personally to implement it and sell them on it once you've validated the model, externally.
Yes, or more precisely, good outbound links counts on your favor. I've never heard of a site being "penalized" for not having links, but I'm sure having good links is good for the website (and also, having bad links is bad to your website).
So how do these third party authentication systems protect against this pretty straightforward javascript way of circumventing the authentication? Anyone know?
So to be more precise you mean open to Google and closed to everyone else. I agree that sucks.
I read the headline in the context of technology and I thought "Wave, Knol, Buzz, ..." and then I read the article. Oh.
Avaya Buys Conference Phone Maker Konftel For $15 Million
How wrong are your prices?
The Obese Baby Boom
"Microserfs" was an interesting read 10 years ago, I'm unsure how it would read today.

A non-fiction recommendation that reads like fiction: "The Soul of a New Machine".
One specific thing off the top of my head is I can't copy videos from Hulu to my mp3 player to watch offline at a later date.
You could modify Wordpress to scale without getting rid of MySQL. You would have to modify Wordpress to use a master/slave setup so that reads came from a cluster of read-only slaves, and writes go to a read/write master. You would also take advantage of static file caching.

Most Wordpress installations are going to be more read-heavy than write-heavy. Take a typical tech blog like Engadget or Techcrunch...there will be a handful of authors, dozens or hundreds of commenters, and thousands to tens of thousands of readers at any given time. You should be able to handle this type of load using static caching and a master/slave database.

For users who aren't logged in, serve pages from a static file cache with a 5 or 10 minute timeout. They won't notice that the latest comments aren't there anyway, since they aren't commenting themselves. You can scale this static cache very easily with Varnish, nginx, etc.

For users who are logged in, serve pages from the database, using a cluster of read-only slaves. This way, they see the latest comments, but since they are being served from slave servers, you can scale this very easily. You could use static caching in front of this setup as well, with a shorter timeout (maybe 30 seconds or less).

For the very small percentage of logged in users who are actively commenting (or performing other activities like voting on polls, rating posts/comments), use the write master database. This will usually be a very small number (dozens to hundreds out of tens of thousands), so load shouldn't be an issue. If you have a particularly active community, you could set this up as a circular replication cluster with multiple write masters.
oh it's not a valid excuse for piracy, piracy is always wrong but it's an explanation of why I pirate. I do buy films and TV shows when I can (I paid $80 for a boxset of The Wire last week (excellent show btw)) but often I can't find the films I want in store so my choice is to either go without or pirate. I have no problem paying, but the availability is a problem. If there were a service that I could pay for and stream movies when I wanted to and they were available I'd have no problem paying for and using.

For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not available, so I pirated it.
Verisign already has de facto control over huge tracts of network security by virtue of having their root certs embedded in various browsers and other PKE-related tools.
I understand that an analog computer can be simulated by a digital computer and vice versa, given enough error correction. That doesn't mean that the speed-up scaling will be the same.

This isn't something that can be answered purely mathematically (with a Turing machine argument); it depends on the specific physics and engineering realities. The trade-off between precision and error rate is determined by math, but the trade-off between error rate and speed is determined by physics.
I'm pretty much the same. I watch one show at the end of the day to relax, but I get them all from bittorrent because they're not available here. A few might be available on digital tv, but for €5 per episode or so. They're usually also a season behind, so I've already seen the episode.

That said, I wouldn't mind paying $10-20 per month so that I don't have to both with downloading and tracking what I have and haven't seen. Also, the majority of the people that I know that use BT for movies/shows would pay that.
I think you're overlooking the fact that this was largely done with JavaScript, some light HTML5, and images.

Over two years ago. Emphasis on the over two years ago part.
Also he was bipolar, so probably in a manic state when he worked for 72 hours straight. There's a pretty big difference between "flaky" and "has a serious mental disorder that is going untreated".
I'll give this one partial credit: there's no doubt that it's useful. I don't think, however that it meets the parameters of my original question. I think the dialer is part of the open-source Android distribution, and it isn't one of "the Google apps" I had in mind.

More importantly, this is a replacement done by the user. Being able to customize your own OS is always (in principle) a benefit. I'm talking about things like AT&T hiding Google Navigation on some of its Android phones to encourage the use of its own paid navigation app.
I disagree about 2. I really think that there's a genetic factor into how intelligent you can become, and that the part of this genetic factor is everything but minor.

The catch is that you need the proper life experience to unlock your potential.
Yup, at a Diggnation meetup/big party a couple of years ago, Alex Albrecht asked the audience (kindof not expecting a real response): "So, how many of you get your music from P2P?" The audience exploded - like 80% of them raised their hands and yelled "Me! I do!" So he was shocked, but laughed it off and followed up with "So how many of you suckers actually pay for music on like iTunes or Amazon?" And the audience went nuts again, it was pretty much the same response. It took him a few minutes to wrap his head around that :-)
Somehow reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbJHkwHZCCM

Will this approach work on the job offers websites?
Agreed, good for Rich.

Personally, I'd have no problem blowing people off who ask for more than they were promised if it got to this point. Then again, that might bring negativity to the community, so I can see how the decision to just stop personal donations makes sense.
direct link to the website for the accelerator programme:
http://springboard.com/
Unless the game cannot effectively be played offline, I think that'd also be doomed.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this.

He's basically complaining that people think they own him (or his time) because they donated money. I've seen that, and it's terribly unfortunate. I was right with him until I saw

"I encourage businesses using Clojure ...to discuss options for corporate support for Clojure."

Seems to me he'd run into similar problems from corporate sponsorships. Am I missing something here?
What is it about rap music that makes it unsuitable for a business article? How many other areas of society do you wall off as inappropriate to learn from when it comes to business?
If you take their data at face value, IE plateaued in late 2009, early 2010 after a long downward trend (from nearly 60% down to about 45%) in Europe. IE’s share only started to go down again in April and from then on slowly but steadily dropped to its current low level. That could support your hypothesis. The browser ballot came with a Windows update that was delivered on March 17 2010.

The only problem I see is that the current downward trend is nothing special if you zoom out a bit. As I already said, that plateau was preceded by a long downward trend. 2008 and 2009 look just like 2010. (StatCounter has no data from before July 2008.) IE has been steadily losing browser share for a long time.

I’m consequently not ready to make any definitive statements about the effects of the browser ballot.
http://goo.gl/MDEpC might help you
The problem with babies from the "worst white trash family" are environmental and maybe genetic from past environmental factors. How many white trash parents have you seen driving around smoking with their kids in the car? Fetal alcohol syndrom? etc etc.
China's Patent Strategy Is An Economic Weapon Against Foreign Companies
Any EBay mass seller willing to buy bulk and sell a package with all the components needed ?

Don't mind paying extra to have it shipped in one box.
It was a guy who said "wikileaks.gov, anyone?" and was downvoted to at least -1.
Take a look at Indonesia, it's ridiculous - Firefox is at 79%, while Chrome is at 12% and IE is at 5%.
For me, it was really about speed. I used Wordpress because I could learn it quickly and I had a modified blog (my goal) as quickly as possible. I didn't have to worry about learning how to connect to a DB, etc.

Today, I actually hate Wordpress as much as you do. I now use Crowd Fusion whenever possible, but Wordpress's introduction to PHP helped a lot.
A couple months ago I couldn't sleep and modded vNES[1] to run on a server and host a WebSockets server, and wrote a Javascript client to interact with it so you can control it from the web page. All people looking at the page can simultaneously control the player; I was looking to eventually allow two different people to use controllers 1 and 2 for real multiplayer.

I'm only sure it runs in Chrome, and it gets all sorts of screwed up when more than one person is trying to use it, but you can check it out running Startropics here:

http://balwiki.com/pub/vnes/

Controls are:

D-Pad = Arrow Keys
D = A
F = B

To me, the two most impressive things are that 1) vNES has been running through screen on my server for months straight without an issue, and 2) Startropics has as well.

[1] http://www.thatsanderskid.com/programming/vnes/index.html
Interesting to see Steve Yegge on the funders list, hadn't noticed that before: http://clojure.org/funders
I think you have to take into account the "menu" of browsers that is available to EU Windows users. There's no way that Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc would be in any kind of position without that, I think.
Regarding helping people: yes, an enlightened workplace would try to help an employee, but it's far from certain (understaing) that it will work.

> And if it had worked he would have repayed you with some amazing work.

This is wishful thinking. If it hadn't worked, it probably wouldn't be clear right away. Instead it would seem like maybe it was working, and you'd spend months to years in a hopeful and guilty cycle trying to help someone who didn't really want to be helped, or worse yet, wanted to be helped, but still couldn't overcome his addiction.

> Your job IS to deal with them - so deal with it.

Firing someone is one way to deal with them.

> Else be happy with the 9-to-5 lifers on you team and shut the fuck up. You'll find that you aren't going to be able todo jack shit with them.

Self-righteous feel-good bullshit. Organizations need all kinds of people. I have great sympathy for types (1) and (2), but there are many cases where they are clearly self-destructive and toxic to others.
Playing with fork/join from Clojure
Increasing Popularity of MIT OpenCourseWare
Automating JSLint Testing
Thanks I needed to read this today.

No matter what people say or how bad things are for you, be thankful for you health and for all that you do have. There are many in much more dire circumstances than we are in. I have had to keep reminding myself of this, today especially.
As long as they don't comment before reading the article, it's fine.
The creators / owners of copyright have only artificial, legal ways of making you pay for the content. There is no moral or ethical reason to pay for the content. It's equivalent to saying You read my post and replied to it without my permission. I want you to send me a photo of you wearing a hat, with a sign saying "I'm really sorry". They have no real claim to that.
My guess is that if a company is willing to sponsor specific development, he is willing to negotiate. I.e. fee-for-service to some extent.
This is a very sound advice, probably the best in terms of where to spend your money. Don't get a cheap laptop, lousy pen or bad-looking notebook. If you follow this rule, you will be always using the best tools.

Good article, but the best tools to get started are the tools that you have at hand regardless of cost.
Reporting it as a fraction of trading profits is a confusing thing to report.

After all, Goldman has lots of non-trading costs: buildings, salaries, software licenses, vendor payments, etc. It was actually 15.5 days of profits for Goldman, plus the $90 million Goldman lost on the deal itself.

(Goldman wasn't just a perpetrator, they were also one of the victims. If you believe the SEC, Goldman helped Paulson to defraud themselves as well as others.)
I think that's him offering corporate support contracts, not sponsorships.
absolutely - most people might not be aware what devices run Android, but they surely heard the name.
If the service is well implemented this should be very hard. Basically when you login you receive a session/ticket (usually by cookie), using that session you post as yourself.

To post as somebody else you would need to get their session which is difficult since it expires after some time and it should very hard to guess (usually an hash with 32 characters or more).

What firesheep does is steal those sessions during transaction. No guessing there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaridole
I honestly can't say that I have ever seen evidence regarding the value of outgoing links. Also, what counts as a good outbound link?
let's just say I was able to get 1,200 facebook likes in 2 hours

And with this you lost absolutely all of my respect.
A blog alert that would, via email give me a way to email my comments to blog topics I am interested.

So say I am interested in Entrepenuership, NYC Pizza, Van Gogh Paintings. I'd get a nice digest in my mail of that days blogs with a way of commenting on them without leaving my Gmail.
I've spoken to people in the mining industry and Chile does produce technology used in mining. It even exports some of this tech, such as explosives.
> Maybe I hang out with too many cynical people, but the Heretics I've run into have usually been pretty popular with coworkers, at least if the Heretic is also a reasonably intelligent and sociable person (rather than the muttering-darkly-in-the-corner variety).

Sadly for the Heretic, that won't help them when the boss fires them. It makes for nice post-"layoff" lunches, though.
Yes, both. Feel free to attempt to change my humble opinion :)
I don't know enough about the intricacies of decimal-to-floating point conversion to have an opinion, but it seems strange to me that there is any sort of approximation process involved at all. Can someone shed light on whether this is a good way of doing things that happened to go wrong on a pathological case or totally crazy or something in between?
There's one less line of code if you use Encoding.UTF8 instead of instantiating your own object (although in principle the encoding is given to you in HttpWebResponse.ContentEncoding).

The Microsoft samples don't seem to do this, but consider putting your WebResponse and StreamReader objects in 'using' blocks: these classes implement IDisposable to ensure orderly cleanup.
The android market is already used as a 'lever' to establish (relatively loose) requirements on phone specs. Your device must be certified before you may include the Market: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-devices-crave...

However, I doubt you'll find much help from Google when it comes to tethering, given their recent history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Market#Banned_applicati...

(The tethering apps were apparently later unbanned, but that at least gives you an idea of their current stance)
I guess I can see that. I didn't read "support" in terms of "support contract" but that does make more sense. Thanks.
Corporate support != corporate sponsorship.

When you get a support contract from Red Hat (for example), you aren't donating money to the development of Linux like a sponsorship; you're indirectly supporting Linux development, but really what you're interested in is either (a) specific solutions to specific problems, or (b) getting access to people should a problem arise in the future during the term of the contract.
The Tyranny of Defense Inc.
I think that the difference is that this is not corporate sponsorship, but a service to corporations.

As I see it with this service they pay him for his consulting and knowledge on how to use at best Clojure for development/testing/deploy.

But they don't have the option to say something regarding the development of the language itself.
So you think piracy is wrong, but you still do it anyway.

As you seem to be willing to pay, why not pay? Just post a cheque to the publisher, or by the DVD later when it comes out.

I'm guessing the answer is convenience. I suppose that makes sense.
Boxee Arrives on New NAS Box - And It‘s Not Ugly
Google will negate the click if they are seeing high bounce rates.
Bah, Humbug! This is the worst kind of High School English teacher nit-picking. -1 point for an upside-down period! I exagerate, but only slightly. The distinction this pollyanna made between a plural and a singular pronoun for referring to a team or group proves it beyond a doubt!
... and that's how I do em: http://www.eekaproof.com
It might be now, but it wasn't back when C was the norm in college. Everyone knew how to step through visual studio in 101, or they failed out. If you didn't have windows, you learned gdb pdq :)