skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the Internet! Why delete any articles, ever!? It's not like Wikipedia is running out of database space or something. It's dumb to have a subjective "notability" standard at all in a world of practically infinite scale.
The simple fact that you can divide the users downloading copyrighted material into multiple groups would mean that the term 'piracy' is a broader term.

it's like piracy is the main subject and theft or non-theft piracy would be the stubs.

PIRACY
/ \
LOST REVENUE NO LOST REVENUE
| |
THEFT NOT THEFT

Piracy is not theft. This is one of those...a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square...type of deals, or maybe not.
Piracy most certainly steals income, it's just not 100%. If 10% of people who pirated a song would have purchased it for $1, then each pirate is effectively stealing 10 cents. Just because it's not 1:1 doesn't mean it isn't a loss of revenue.
The Internet's New Shortcut
yeah, they're going to be stuck with the negative reputation for a while within the community
So, I'm not sure I completely understand, but I'd like to give it a shot.

You hit Feed Y every 30 seconds which is silly because it's probably updated once an hour or less. Every time you hit Feed Y, you get the RSS for the last 25 postings which takes up bandwidth and possibly processing power for the remote server to generate and processing power and bandwidth on your end to download and consume. BAD! So much waste trying to make sure we get instant updates!

So, Feed Y creates a little "I was last updated at time()" feed. You download that and are transmitting very little unless there's an update in which case you grab the feed. Awesome! Now, I ping 1,000,000 "I was updated at time()" feeds for various Facebook users. . .hmm, that's a ton of HTTP requests and transmission over head.

Scratch that, let's have Facebook create a single feed of all their feeds that have been updated in the past 60, 300, and 600 seconds! So, we hit that every 30 seconds and update then grab whatever is new! Wow! That means that for me to digest updates for all my users who want their Facebook feeding into my service, I just hit one SUP feed and then grab whatever that SUP feed says has changed. That's a lot better than hitting 1,000,000 feeds every 30 seconds.

So, this isn't good for your RSS reader or whatnot, but it would be huge for sites like Friendfeed or anything that feeds Friendfeed since it would reduce the bandwidth and processing on both sides. As they said, they are likely to miss some updates with SUP, but if they can get 90% of the updates that way, they can change from pinging individual feeds every 30 minutes to pining them every 300 minutes and still get new items 10 times as fast by pinging the SUP feeds every 3 minutes.

Cool. Practical. Open. Good-Neighbor vibrations for services they pull from. Could even be game changing as it could allow you to aggregate the data you like over many services in a way that was too bandwidth/processing intensive to scale if everyone started doing it.
The news article and the blog post miss a big point that only became apparent to me through Taylor's comment (1): SUS allows services to collect all the individual user update IDs into one file, allowing--for example--FriendFeed to just check <flickr.com/.sus> rather than doing HTTP HEADs on thousands of Flickr feeds.

1: http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fe...
Ask Entrepreneurs: Obama and capital gains tax increases
The majority of entrepreneurs that I know are big fans of Obama despite the likely tax increases. This also includes a steep increase in capital gains.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't follow politics as closely as I should and I'm not trying to use HN for political debating...but I was interested in hearing other entrepreneurial minded people chime in on this.

As a hacker at a startup...why do I want a 25%+ capital gains tax if we're successful? It's like being punished for working hard and taking a lot more risk than the average schlep.
I recently launched a direct competitor to you: http://adexchanged.com/ We've had 205194 ad impressions served in the 28 days since we've launched. I'd be interested if you wanted to share some of your numbers...

The fact that competitors spring up proves that there's a market there... right? Isn't that how web 2.0 works ;)

We're going to launch some major new features and improvements next week (hopefully putting google analytics and google adsense out of business ;).
Isn't this all just semantics? It all just depends on how you define theft. From what I understand, given the legal definition, it generally (but not always) is not exactly theft.
1) what does "competitor" translate to, for non-profits?

2) why write new source if your goal is just to launch another wiki?
Makes you want to rethink what you say online. The application was able to bring identities that I thought were completely separated online. Great job
Not just be a top coder, but be a good salesman, self promoter, and networker to make those opportunities.
it's hard to deny it's illegal in many places. If you're ok with breaking the law, and you think it's moral to "pirate"

It may be illegal, but that does not mean a pirate is breaking the law. The basis of piracy is to sovereignly act, without blessing from the land oligopoly. A pirate may be attacked by a nation, but the concept of law is absent from such interaction.
I find it quite unfortunate that this is termed as a "Twitter for comments" rather than just a comment tracker. The application has merit in itself, regardless of Twitter's existence and history. This would have been useful even before Twitter.
No, Seriously: Microsoft Patents Page Up & Page Down
MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms, Lecture 6: Order Statistics
Fair enough. We've found it a useful way to explain the idea of following all your friends comments. There are two ways people are using it right now; following comments by the author (twitter for comments), and searching them by keywords.
Pardon me if this has been addressed completely before, but you are storing the comments on your server, right (I wouldn't believe you if you say no anyway)? Privacy issues aside, what about copyright issues?

Disqus, for example, says that the comment owners are owned by the commenters. Suppose then, as a comment owner I want to prohibit you from storing it on your servers?
Django vs Symfony
That did sound pretty bad. But I think top VCs are more careful now, because word of any misdeeds spreads so much faster. E.g. I could not imagine a Greylock partner today pulling the kind of trick Philip Greenspun describes them pulling on Ars Digita.
Hi there! We have a panel submission at SXSW 2009 - http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2033 ... So if enough people vote/comment, we will be speaking there. ;)

Also, would love to touch base if you are in SF - do ping me at mingyeow@gmail.com
I don't think lawyers are inclined to go after their bretheren this way, but I do think lawyers get a lot of business through referrals, and clients who don't feel like they've been screwed will refer friends and colleagues.

This would be particularly important in corporate law for small businesses, where the lawyers have ongoing relationships with clients (as opposed to, say, personal injury law, where some guy hit by a truck picks an attorney out of the Yellow Pages and may never deal with the lawyer after that case is resolved).

Of course, I'm making suppositions based on my knowledge of economics. Maybe I should consult an economist.
I personally went for almost a year once, this century, without spending a penny.
Paul - one potential issue is the size of the parent SUP feed itself. For sites like Facebook/Flickr/Netflix which have millions of active users, the size of the SUP feed itself might be huge. What are your thoughts on getting around that? Overall, it sounds like a super idea.
Actually this analog is exactly what drives Baen Free Library. They gave ebooks away free, in a multitude of formats, and found that:

1. Many downloaders ended up buying physical copies because paper books are easier to use.

2. It drove up sales of older catalog items, which had been crowded out of the shelves at physical bookstores.

3. It created new fans of the authors, driving up future book sales.

You can read about it at http://www.baen.com/library/
Robot.txt file. You can tell Google to do the same thing.
We've been using yahoo for 5 or 6 years now and we're just used to it. I think it costs about $10/season and given how seriously we take this thing, it doesn't feel like a lot of money.

Incidentally, we tried to run a league on fleaflicker last year (for free) in parallel with the yahoo league, and the experience was severely lacking.
Holla!
To make copy protection work, consumers have to be coerced/convinced into using locked-down systems. If we use systems that we have total control over, then copy protection will never succeed. There still is the analog hole, as well.
And adding to that, the piracy can become a very valuable form of marketing, where the kids pirate it for school and buy it for business, thus possibly increasing your net income.
Interesting and fun idea. Encourages learning more about startups and adds in a competitive twist. Wish there were more companies added though
And oldie but a goodie. I remember when this first happened. A lot of people thought the industry would never recover. My opinion was always that half of the people thought it was rigged anyway (even when it wasn't) and still played, so what was the difference?

I think I've since been proven right by the fact that Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker still exist.
Definately a different way to view things..
And yes - it probably should have a NSFW tag on it.

I must admit though - I am curious about the fact that "ass" is in 0.62% of GOSPEL songs..
If you were smart, you would never get caught. That person got caught because he played every single hand in a tournament.

Instead, what you'd do is you would play preflop without the knowledge. Then you'd probably want to set it up such that you were only getting the info some relatively small % of the time postflop too. It would be enough to turn anyone who was a marginal winner into a large consistent one, but not so big of one as to be caught, especially with routine account switches.
Apple bans a comic book, firestorm ensues
depends what community. any designer with the mainstream web (my parents) in mind will be reasonably attentive and receptive to this news (bearing in mind the large inertia people have in upgrading their programs - and with an upgrade this major ["Tabs? what the heck are tabs??"] there's no way microsoft will ram it down peoples' gobs, so rollout is likely to be slow.
It's an interesting product tactics question though: if it were up to you, how would you encourage mainstream uptake of IE8?
You're concentrating on the wrong side of technology. In order to prevent copying, one has to do so on _every_ computing/playback device, not only the content producer blessed ones.

As long as we've got private communications, it will become ever easier to share media over the internet. It only takes one "Pirate_0" to break the copy protection (even if it requires digitizing LCD signals). And if breaking the protection requires substantial capital, the market will oblige.
I had friends who worked in a local theater and we hung out there quite a bit. The manager was locally famous for instructing employees to turn a blind eye to "lurkers" because "If you stay in a movie theater that long, you're gonna be hungry and thirsty eventually".

Turns out that the rental on the reels was so high that the ticket sales themselves were basically a break even proposition. $7 popcorn and $4 sodas are a completely different story.
Not quite the semi-deliberate situation that the parent referred to, but does an explicitly deliberate occurrence count? I've had a theater manager let me and my two friends in to see a film for free and to thank him, we bought snacks at the snack bar even though we just ate. The theater was mostly empty (the movie was "Jesus Is Magic" in case you were wondering), which was probably his motivation. No, I did not know the manager personally.
Consumer:
- ACM membership
- Skype

Business:
- Google Email
- Skype
Indeed. This seems to be putting a "price" (really, with those numbers, these are just game-like "points", they aren't going to change anyone's compensation meaningfully) on what amounts to the low hanging fruit of the development world.

Yes, all that stuff is good. But you can do all that right, constantly refactor code, write tests to avoid "rolling out bugs caught by others", and still have an expensive, out-of-control project. This just seems like a way to turn otherwise wasted developer cycles in to busywork. It's seems fine, and might be fun for a while, but I can't see this making a huge difference in the long term
reliable sources (blogs don't count)

Aren't there reliable blogs?
I think most people would understand "create a competitor" to entail more than the strawman of mere implementation you seem to be taking it to mean.
The poem is a fragment from a larger epistle... there are probably a dozen accurate translations of it, all different. I went with this one because I like the way it reads in English.

Disclaimer: My Japanese proficiency is pretty limited. I studied it for a couple of years and have a passable accent, but mostly I just know enough to get myself in trouble :)
Indeed. FTA:

"First and foremost, by being the best damned Java or C++ programmer their management had ever seen. In 1996, I took three Java books on my honeymoon, and read them. [...] Every single night after work on my C++ contracts, I would read something from Design Patterns and Stroustrup."

Truly, the author is a paragon of development expertise. He reads books (books!) on Java and DP. He's even read the manual of his programming language! That's one 133+ h4x0r there, I tell you. I'm in awe.
If you're successful, a 25% capital gains tax is not all that onerous. What's the difference between $20M and $15M? Sure, it's $5M, but what can $20M buy you that $15M cannot?

Many entrepreneurs are much more concerned with becoming successful, and having a reasonably tech-friendly politician in the White House like Obama would help. Net neutrality can generate far more wealth for entrepreneurs than the capital gains tax will take away.

Of course, then he had to go and nominate Biden for VP...
But no commonly accepted way to validate their reliability
13 hours prep for each hour of teaching, and 8 hours recovery from each meeting (+ prep I assume) and still has time to do coding.

I'm impressed.
They're good for adding more information but bad for establishing notability (as per Wiki policy) because their reliability is contentious.

So yes, there are reliable blogs, but a post from Scoble and no mainstream media hits won't save an article from the deletionists.
This is exactly the reason any software I develop in my spare time I'd release as an open source project.

I think open source also has a more attractive price tag too, but maybe I might consider selling support somewhere down the line...
Ironic, perhaps, but not at all surprising. Wikipedia is a portrait of wikipedians.
Unless you're Apple
I read this: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and then purchased the book later on.

Why? Because I found it was a useful book and wanted to support the author and own a physical copy. I also would have never purchased the book if I hadn't been able to go through it first online.

I realize that I wasn't pirating - but the analogy doesn't break down in the manner you suggest.
I guess i'd define "capable" as having the best browser experience ever experienced on a cell phone. The competition may have java and flash, but the competition also dosn't have the touch based technology combined with the the design aesthetics that the iphone has. So when I mention "capable" and they use "the internet", you can say in a sense that they are talking about the iphone internet experience thats unique to that device even without the java and flash.
So you think that the definition of theft requires lost revenue?

Would you accept that in end cases?

Say you steal a toy from a child that has piles of em? They don't even notice. Not theft?
I think you guys are going down the wrong path here.

It doesn't matter (to the status of piracy) whether or not piracy is harmful or any other consequences. If 90% of shoplifters get hit with a sudden case of Dostoevsky & slip envelopes under doors resulting in 120% ... It would still be theft. Just like assault is still assault if they sober up & buy you an icecream.

I'm not saying piracy is theft. It is different enough to warrant its own word (& its own treatment). 'Preventing revenue' is not a reasonable explanation. Standing outside a store and yelling like a madman scaring away customers is also preventing (stealing?) revenue.

In some cases, I think that piracy is helpful to companies (photoshop might be an example) in others it's harmful. But that's besides the point. You can invoke that in a wider discussion of how laws should be made or you may be making a moral assertion that rights & such aren't important, only consequences. But that's not really our system (or most people's understanding).

Anyway this discussion is 90% semantics. It's only important to propaganda campaigns (saying stealing is more effective then saying violating copyright).
cues donkey puns
Is there a roadmap somewhere? Seems like there's lots of obvious improvements that could be added. For example, chaining so you can "highlight and email to ..." (or "highlight | email to ..." if you prefer)
The point is that the main problem can't be solved at the two-guys-in-a-garage level.

Two guys in a garage can create a wiki. Two guys in a garage with a million dollar PR budget can create a wiki and get it widely publicised. Two guys in a garage with a fifty million dollar budget can hire a bunch of writers to get the content kickstarted. But ultimately, the problem of persuading thousands of people to contribute to a brand new service is not a problem that anyone knows how to solve -- it either takes off or it doesn't.
If you're a keyboardist and use OSX, give QuickSilver a try. Awesome little app -- I hardly touch the mouse all day. I'm so dependent on QS that I look clumsy using a stock OSX install without it.
It's such a good idea that it's already been done N times already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_blog
I saw the Lips 3 years ago and had a blast, one of the best shows I've ever been to. There's an art to entertaining a small crowd, and one to entertaining a large one. My guess is that the Flaming Lips are masters at both.
This seems an excellent proposal - it looks like they've really thought through the update-feed production side, as well as it being a good format for the consumption side. The idea of doing this in a cron job (or equivalent) means that most feed-producers should get immediate resource savings...

It would also be interesting for sites to put a smart http proxy/cache in front of their RSS feeds; the cache could itself use SUP to invalidate old entires. So even RSS clients that didn't support SUP would get the benefit. Might really help the likes of Twitter...
The guys at VPRI http://vpri.org/
ahem Kayak for Sports Tickets

This is straight out of Made to Stick. It gets people to understand what you're saying or building very very quickly. Once you're established, the word linking is no longer necessary.

They should have marketed themselves the TicketStumbler of comments, but I digress.
It's true that people tend to be more aggressive about deleting pages about people and companies than they are about deleting random Star Trek crap, but it kinda makes sense. Most of the truly rubbish pages which show up on wikipedia are random schmoes creating their own wikipedia pages to promote themselves, their businesses, their bands or their blogs, so the notability criteria for people, businesses, bands and blogs are pretty firmly enforced. At least there's only a finite supply of random Star Trek crap to be incorporated.
BackType fills a huge need for every startup founder out there who wants to keep on top of what people are saying about their product. I look at it every day.

The BackType guys have really nailed it.
I pay for GitHub and AWS. Total cost: under $10/mo
What Languages Fix (old article)
SUP is conceptually similar, except that instead of pinging a handful of well known feeds, SUP producers declare where their updates are available. Also, by using SUP-IDs instead of urls, the SUP feed is smaller, publishers can keep feeds private, and spam problems are eliminated (ping feeds are generally full of spam blogs). Briefly, SUP adds:

- Discoverability (feeds declare where they publish their updates)

- Privacy (SUP does not expose a site namespace or secret urls)

- Efficiency (each SUP entry is only about 20 bytes)

In practice, none of the feed based services other than the blogs use pinging services. Our hope is that with SUP we can get faster updates from the 42 non-blogging services that FriendFeed imports.
The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole
I think you might be confused as to what Python's lambdas are for. The name is very misleading - it really should be called a function expression. It's just a shortcut for declaring a function with an expression. It's useful for situations where you need to pass in a very simple utility function, as is usually the case with list.sort() and its comparison function argument.

I'm not sure what points you're trying to make with your other complaints, but I guess if you "feel" things are hackish, that's OK. What you might consider feeble-minded hacks Python coders consider simple, straightforward implementations.
I think the difference here is that there's one feed for all users rather than a ping-per-user/blog
Here's why: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
No, Gnip is a complementary service and will likely consume SUP. SUP is intended to make it easier for feed publishers to expose information about which feeds have been updated. Without this information, Gnip can't know when feeds have updated except by polling all of them. SUP allows them to poll a single URL instead.
The SUP feed is designed to be very compact. The SUP feed on FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json) is only about 8 bytes per entry after gzip. If a service had 10 updates per second (which is faster than Twitter, for example), then a 60 second SUP feed would be 4800 bytes, which is tiny.

My expectation is that only large feed consumers (such as FriendFeed or Gnip) will fetch SUP. Smaller ones will probably use an intermediary service such as Gnip since they would only be interested in a small fraction of the updates.

They key purpose of SUP is to make it as easy as possible for feed publishers to let the world know which of their feeds have updated.
If that's a problem, I'd assume you could shard your SUP feeds any number of ways.

Say... first 100k feeds reference sup1.json, second 100k reference sup2.json, etc.

And given that each RSS/Atom feed <links> to its SUP feed, you could reorganize arbitrarily by updating the link, and the poller should pick it up on the next go-around.
I approve.
"... What do you actually pay for, you, yourself? ..."

Thrifty: consumer/biz: flickr, domain, adsl
(The cartoon guide to) Löb's Theorem
Do you have some evidence for that claim?

Because in Canada here we allow downloading music as part of fair use like listening to the radio. The artist gains exposure from music downloads which could increase your sales.

So what if this 'stealing' was causes 10% of the users to not buy the music, but 20% of the user to buy the music they would have been otherwise unaware of.
I was referring to piracy of intellectual property. I should have been more clear.