skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised that so many here, a community where lots of people are engaged in entrepreneurial ventures and where many donate to the unpaid author of widely-pirated shareware [1], would appear to be so laissez-faire on this issue. Whether you call it theft or breach of contract, piracy is wrong and not good.

Did anyone here really say that copyright infringement was good? Saying that it's not "theft" doesn't automatically throw one into the pro-piracy camp. Copyright infringement can certainly be wrong and extremely detrimental to our culture - that's why we have copyright laws in the first place.
Human interaction is not code. Human discussion is not code. People are not code. Repetition is how people learn and understand things. Seeing a point once makes a person think "oh good point". Seeing many times forces them to think of it in different contexts and different ways. This allows them to understand it better.

Congratulations to you for being around long enough, and seeing this point enough times, that you find it commonplace. I guarantee however that there are plenty of people here who still need to see it. There are lots of people on this site who are very intelligent in many ways who make comments like "you need to protect your patent or you lose it" or "copyright doesn't count unless registered". As long as they exist, this point can be made without it just being echo chamber fodder.
Yes. But even during alpha, the sentence I quoted was on the terms and services page.
Weight lifting combined with a very carefully controlled diet.
I'm looking for statistician/analyst position.I have
knowledge of R, Python, MySql, etc.

I'll be a full time student starting in June and
would prefer to find part time work.
You do have a point that web services cannot be pirated, and if they could be, the HN community would have a different view on things.

I'm not sure that's the case.

Let's start with the base assumption that piracy is something that exists, and will forever exist. Just work your way around it, and use it for your advantage.

For example, build your product so that the more users it has, even if they are illegal users, the overall experience improves.

Don't fight battles you can't win. Use the circumstances to your advantage.
The Motorola Droid has slightly more pixels than other Android phones. This led to a bunch of apps coming out in a "Droid" edition which put those extra pixels to good use. The new tablets have 1280 x 800, 1024 x 768, 1024 x 600 etc. resolutions, so should each one have its own tab?
Great idea, very simple and instantly cross-platform.
Possibly because the system as it exists now might be perceived as near-optimal for the average user: some people fund creative works that others enjoy for free. Thus, the discussion is consistently trainwrecked into one of semantics (sometimes, with a bit of a victim mentality thrown in) because some people would like the system to continue as is. Real solutions to this problem are very hard, and I can't think of one in which someone doesn't get screwed.

Then again, it is quite refreshing to see so many people defend the purity of the English language.
Ask HN: Safety from SQL injection?
Which web application environments offer the best safety against SQL injection? (Or equivalent in NoSQL databases) How is this claim justified? Is it through dataflow analysis, whitelisting, rewriting? Do people have comparative experiences?
We're building this for Django, (open source, a subclass of the django admin) at github.com/servee/servee. We need help. Not enough hours in the week.
The Trumpet Winsock story had to do with commercial actors "stealing" software and mass-redistributing it for profit.

This story has to do with people "stealing" software for their own private use without paying.

Given the existing level of confusion in all piracy discussions, I believe it is counterproductive to lump these two scenarios together.
Completely agree, but I believe that change can come only by example.

Majority of people plays safe. There is nothing wrong in that. If someone can show them better choice, not by talking, but by creating better private school for underprivileged kids, they will start sending their kids in such schools.

When some percentage of people accepts that there are more options, I believe that more intelligent debate will emerge.
I don't know whether it is or isn't piracy, but it's hard to take his opinion on this as representative or forward thinking because of how "special" Minecraft is (i.e. it's massively popular). Maybe his goal is to maximize revenue, but it doesn't seem like that. In that case, I'd be more interested in the perspective of someone who's pulling in 30k/year in sales and has the same 70% "lost sales" rate. When you're making millions, there's a threshold above which more money is just more money and doesn't really matter (depending on the person). But the difference between 30k/year and what might be 60-80k/year if there was a lower piracy rate would probably drive me nuts because that's the difference between making a living doing something and not.
Exactly. I'm thinking more of approaching it from the dynamic language side, and making applications "harder" with more static typing as they mature and stabilize. I think that's the right time to benefit from the added documentation of type annotations. At the same time, programmers also benefit from the flexibility of the dynamic language during early prototyping and initial development stages.
If people are still referring to unauthorized copying as theft the point hasn't been made enough, regardless of how many times you've been forced to read it.

In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.
The clause I quoted was there even during alpha (unfortunately web.archive.org doesn't have older versions so I can't link it).

During alpha the rules were: "if they release updates, you get them for free. But you agree that when you pay, you pay for the game as-is and you don't have any right to expect updates".

Meaning: "Maybe I lose interest in doing this and just stop updating it. You have no right to be mad about this. If I update it though, you will get that update for free"
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
What makes some rights more inherent than others? Some people seem to think that a right can be inherent in an absolute almost mathematical sense. This is a lack of imagination. Many rights that seem inherent now were not in the past and are not going to be in the future.

Rights should be judged by their usefulness, not by how fundamental some person thinks they are, because no right is truly fundamental.
I really like the domain name, I wonder how often it gets misspelled :)
Donated. Ah, the memories of surfing the real web in 1994. (Not some Prodigy/AOL version of it)
If that's true across the board, then they're definitely making a fair amount from Android. They're supposed to be getting north of 300k daily activations, which could mean $3mil daily or north of $1bil annual revenue from Android if they're making $10/device directly.
"He’s tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home..."

Kudos to him. It's amazing how people have the ability to reprogram their bodies in order to break their handicap.

Reminds me of a story "Blind Teen Gamer Obliterates Foes" http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/07/68333
Wow. What an incredibly uplifting story.
In any given locale, there are usually only 1-3 choices of ISP.

Two is most common, so they can give illusion of competition, without having to coordinate with too many "competitors".
just FYI, Chrome browser does a decent job in translating the page to English
Copyright infringement isn't theft but it is criminal.

In which jurisdiction?

Copyright infringement is against the law but it's not a "crime" (and therefore not criminal). This is true of most civil offenses. Some conditions apply in order to turn copyright infringement into a misdemeanor or a felony in a federal sense - wilfulness and varying levels of financial gain.

If you are merely conflating the words "illegal" and "criminal", they do not mean the same thing. (At least, I've only studied law within the context of England and Wales but believe the US system takes a similar approach on these fundamental issues given its ancestry.)
Using database stored procedures to retrieve or store data and passing any value that comes from the client process (user entered or not) via a parameter to those stored procedures (rather than constructing an SQL statement from strings) will deal with the problem in every database I have worked with (assuming stored procedures and variable parameters).

Justification? That's just how you guard against SQL injection attacks.
"There are thousands of schools that certify medical doctors, but only one certification agency for medical devices."

Somewhat amazingly, there are only 133 schools in the united states that award MDs - https://www.aamc.org/about/medicalschools/
You might be surprised, actually.

Not necessarily the same as books, but may be somewhat relevant.

There was a Japanese think tank that recently released a report that found the online piracy actually boosted the sale of anime DVDs.

http://torrentfreak.com/internet-piracy-boosts-anime-sales-s...

Personally, I used to work in the music business for Nettwerk Records (hence the Nettdata username), Sarah McLachlan's label. We were one of the few labels that believed that the freely available online versions of songs actually stimulated sales, especially for back catalogues.

When Sarah's Surfacing album released, we actually ripped high quality MP3 versions of the songs and hosted them for free download. We also created a streaming "radio" site that allowed you to make and play your own playlists from any and all of the songs Nettwerk had the rights to.

We had real live numbers that showed sales were up a LOT after we made things available online.

I think more than anything the content producers are being forced to rethink their models, especially when it comes to the record industry.

If they made their back catalogues available in an individual song format for a reasonable price (whatever that would be), I think they'd do well.

And for what it's worth, I actually bought a non-DRM'd eBook this morning, one that I can read on my laptop in PDF, or on my iPhone and iPad in eBook format. I'm sure it was available in some pirated format, but I'm one of those guys that would rather support the things I want to see more of.
What gripes me most about pirates is that a lot still feel they have some form of entitlement for support. For example, I get emails all the time saying "I'll pay for the app, but only if you provide feature X and fix bug Y, until then, it's just not worth 99 cents.".
Online Tech Announces Cloud Computing Webinar and Seminar Series
HN, by far.
Is there a UI that I can use to edit the lists? The whole plustag thing seems tedious.
Isn't that like saying...?

- Books can be copyrighted

- Words can't be copyrighted

- All books are basically words
As a VS Macro (Warning: VB)

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports EnvDTE90a
Imports EnvDTE100
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module Module1

Sub ClassNameGen()
Dim res As String
Dim req As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.classnamer.com/")
Dim rsp = req.GetResponse()
Using sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(rsp.GetResponseStream())
res = sr.ReadToEnd()
End Using

Dim doc As Document = DTE.ActiveDocument
Dim textDoc As TextDocument = CType(doc.Object("TextDocument"), TextDocument)
textDoc.StartPoint.CreateEditPoint()

Dim strstr As String = "<p id=""classname"">"
Dim endstr As String = "</p>"
Dim strt As Integer = res.IndexOf(strstr)
textDoc.Selection.Insert(res.Substring(strt + strstr.Length, res.Length - (res.IndexOf(endstr, strt) + endstr.Length)))
End Sub

End Module
Is "Warimals" aimed at the under-13 crowd?

I suspect that the Facebook market penetration is high enough in their target demographic as to make this the most effective way for them to go. Sure, they could provide some secondary log-on technique for the non-Facebook-using minority, but would it really be worth the additional customer support headaches?
What? So if I hire you and don't pay you, you can go back in time, thus not losing the hours of effort you will never get back? I strongly doubt this, but assuming it is true: why haven't you just invested in the stock market and made trillions of dollars yet?

With your creative people, they never had a contract in place. I was never going to buy their music, game, book or whatever. I don't owe them anything. If they want to speculate on me giving them some money for the work they do, they can, but that doesn't guarantee crap. Further, if I copy say, a song: I have the song, they have the song, i paid the same as i would have paid anyway ($0). Somehow you are saying that the band lost money tho? If the pope declares the music satanic, and threatens listeners with excommunication, do you sue the Catholic Church for lost sales?

If I show up at your house and mow your lawn in speculation that you will pay me for that service, but you choose not to do that, do I get to sue you for theft now? Because it sure sounds like that is what you are saying.
Yeah the plustag thing is really the advanced UI - if you click "List Members" on the bottom of any emails you get from fiesta (including the welcome email), you'll see the web UI.
Sounds a good concept. Can anyone send email to the created list or just the initial members? What if the list is already created / used by other people?
To grind it right down to its essence, facts cannot be patented, but the application of facts to solve a problem can be patented.

Charcoal burns and produces heat. Water boils when heated. It produces steam. Steam has a larger volume. The increase in volume can move a piston. A piston attacked eccentrically to a wheel causes it to rotate about its axis.

All these things are natural facts that cannot be patented. But put them together to solve the problem of turning fossil fuels into mechanical energy, and you've got a steam engine.

The difficulty with complaining that patenting software is patenting math is the difficulty of complaining that patenting steam engines is patenting facts of nature. The patent is for the application of facts to solve problems, and that applies equally to facts of math as it does to facts of nature.

Now patents may be a bad idea, or perhaps a good idea badly executed, but that is a different argument. I assert that if you can patent the application of nature to create a steam engine, you ought to be able to patent the application of math to create a program.
Off-topic, but your roommate is my colleague.....all the best :)
Only members of the list can send an email to the list - since the list names are tied to the sender's address you don't need to worry about uniqueness (ie. my family@fiesta.cc is different than your family@fiesta.cc)
Not forgotten. I still remember your PetrOS project -- the premise made me quite excited at the time!
Mailing list systems are complicated for a reason: the signup process where you have to send a confirmation mail is there to prevent users from unsolicted mails.

How are you going to solve the problem of unsolicted mail deployed through these autovivified mailing lists?
Thanks I'm glad you like the ad sizes. My goal was to make it pretty hard to get a 404 while sticking to a format that's natural and easy to use. Originally dummyimage.com only had size parameters then peopel clamored for color and custom text thanks to another Hacker News post.

I've jotted down the brief history of how dummyimage.com got started for anyone interested as well http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/the-history-of-dummyimag...
>What a loaded question.

Whoa. Let's rephrase the question then. The parent defined better smartphone as better browsing. Let's replace iPhone with Palm Pre (or something else other than an Android phone). My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a standard phone when other companies will do it for you.

>First, Google pays Apple something like a few hundred million dollars per year to be the default search engine.

I'm not sure where you got this number. The closest number to this is here: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Google-Apple-Search-iPhone-Bing,... and that's not even a quote. This is just speculation anyways. The best place to look is here: http://www.apple.com/investor/ and analyze the reported data to see where this number might be hidden.

But let's suppose that Google didn't pay this money. Do you think that all the iPhone users would not use Google? I think that Apple would have eventually folded and just made Google the default engine, or made none of the search engines default and allowed the user to select the one they wanted. Google is clearly the search leader and it's not clear to me that Apple would wipe every trace of Google off of its phone.

>Second, I've got no idea what you're talking about with the backstabbing. Hhuh? Are you somehow insinuating that open source software invites backstabbing?

Nope. Sounds like I pushed a button here; didn't mean to. I'm saying that phone manufacturers could take advantage of the Google's investment in Android by thwarting the business purpose for Android by partnering with another search engine to fulfill the search needs for their users.

I'm not debating the merits of Android or open source. I don't understand how having it makes more money than not having it.
My understanding is that most drivers allow for a parameterized statement, which escapes quotes and otherwise makes SQL "safe" for database consumption. I've used those everywhere I've interacted with a database and have never heard an argument against it.

Of course, I've also never worked in a place that allowed stored procedures so I may be missing out on an advantage there.
"It’s °C in Rosenheim, Germany"

It accidentally the whole temperature.
Awesome concept. It was about time someone innovated on the mailing list concept.
Can you add addresses to a list later on?
Hrm, I see what you're saying - that is an interesting question. I'm not actually sure of the answer.
We've got some basic spam prevention already in place with some more advanced ideas being implemented soon.

You're right though, if all else fails the welcome email will just end up having an opt-in link.
Running

coffee -cw *.coffee

will watch all of the CoffeeScript files in a directory and compile them to JavaScript whenever they change, which is what I use for keeping things updated in development, and the production deployment scripts I run compile the CoffeeScript to JS before deploying.

Aside from having to set up a terminal running the compilation task when I start a dev session, the fact that it has to be compiled doesn't affect me at all.
I prefer that the content rendering system should be completely seperate from the content editing system - very few systems do that though.

In my experience the rendering system and editing system probably have very different performance and scalability requirements.

I agree that having the edited content looking visually different from the rendered content is usually a bad thing.
Hmm, I dunno.

Apples to oranges for me. I look at HN as a place where techies discuss topics that interest them, vs Techmeme which lists tech stories in the media, sans discussion.
Yup, can add (or remove) addresses at any time using the "List members" link at the bottom of every fiesta email you get.
Inspiration for Viral Online Marketing
Really disappointing, Zynga also acquired an engine developer (Aves engine).

Seems like none of the big guys want developers to have tools to build nice games.
That makes sense, since you want to quickly prototype code (ignoring those annoying type annotations :D) and as the code matures, you want the extra details inserted to help achieve higher performance. Get it right, THEN get it fast.

In my case, I try to have the compiler deduce the information to make it fast, where it can, but fall back to JIT when it can't, or where running the application is the best way of figuring out what needs to be optimized. The missing link between what I'm doing and what you are suggesting is that the runtime should be able to dump metadata for the compiler to use next time around. I'm going to have to think about this a bit, I think there may be some great applications of this idea, eg, turning assertion failures into unit test stubs. It would be great if the compiler and runtime worked together to help you program 1) more efficient programs and, probably more importantly, 2) correcter, less error prone programs. I love the concept of the compiler "hardening" code that was detected to produce errors in a previous run, especially if the JIT compiler can remove checks that are not needed.
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GL@LinkUp.com (the best job search engine because it only has jobs off company sites.
This is not a trick or scam. No agenda other than a free unsolicited gift to those who are making things happen.
I'll see your LOLspeak non-spammy link with one of my own, a lolspeak translator written in JavaScript http://www.txt2lol.com/
Nicely done, jgc. I continue to be impressed by your ongoing efforts, and I'm glad to see you're getting the press train rolling on this one as effectively as you did with your Turing apology project.
I agree with your list, but I think the 'What can I do with it?' question is more like 'What's the potential for me being able to do new things with this in the future?' - apps, and the likelihood of more of them being available in the future, translate into people valuing the device for more than just what it will do when they first get it out of the box.

With iOS there's a reasonable expectation that the consumer will be able to choose from a growing selection of applications in the future, based on the past performance of the App Store and Apple's marketing around it. This translates into extra value, in that the device has the potential to increase in capability over time.

I think you could argue the case that the Android platform could also be perceived this way by consumers, although I suspect the mainstream consumer is maybe less certain of the future availability of applications on Android. (That's based on the limited marketing of Android, and specifically of it as a platform for apps, that I've seen in the UK, so may be different in other markets.)

But I do think it places the other platforms (HP's WebOS, RIM's QNX) at a distinct disadvantage. I think many consumers will consider them to be worse value purely because they don't expect they'll be able to choose from a growing selection of applications in the future.
I actually did a double-take when I got to the end and saw the byline (I hadn't noticed the one at the top). If I hadn't read it, I never would have thought it was written by a politician (and minister in the current government).
BlackBerry Messenger will launch on Android and iOS
Ah, very cool :) Thanks for the explanation...

*btw, I would not use a ".cc" domain for the project, since it is mostly used by malware stuff lately :/
Thanks for the kind words. They mean a lot to me.

BTW Speaking of Turing there's a new documentary being worked on (http://turingfilm.com/) and I spoke to the producer of "Breaking The Code" and it looks like we'll manage to arrange a DVD release in time for 2012.
Is there a top 1%? It's hard to really tell, but I think software development isn't a single rankable skill but a bunch of different ones, sometimes skills that are directly opposed to each other. The best person for a job depends on what kind of job it is.