skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today I got to talk to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, one of the very few legislators who is fighting this. Here are my notes: http://33bits.org/2011/05/19/fighting-protect-ip-congresswom... There were some surprises for me. Here is the summary:

Appeals to free speech and chilling effects are at best temporary measures in the fight against Protect IP and domain seizures. Even if we win this time it will keep coming back in modified form; the only way defeat it for good is to convince Washington that artists are in fact thriving, that piracy is not the real problem, and that takedown efforts are not in the interest of society. We in the tech world know this, but we are doing a poor job of making ourselves heard in Washington, and this needs to change.
Because GNOME is supposed to be an open, not closed system. At least that's how I've always seen it.

P.S. Since I got 2 downvotes, could someone please explain me what's wrong with writing a personal opinion?
marbles (pieces of tyre) do not build up on the racing line. they build up off the racing line and thus are not a factor in "most critical areas". they are a factor if the driver has to go off the racing line. to defend, pass or avoid.
Doesn't the notes function has a limit to how much text you can save/publish? Or is is that just for what you can publish to the website?
Erm. No. OSNews is inaccurate and so is the title.

Or in a short message to the masses, < 140 chars:

https://twitter.com/#!/jdub/statuses/71218014703468545
Fair and Balanced. Did Fox News write the headline?
This author blames Amazon for a poor SLA yet continues using their service?

What cloud provider offers a more reasonable SLA?
Smartreloader Rings
Smartreloader offers different ring models like fixed scope rings, sport utility rings, mount rimfire rings which have a unique wrap around design.
I'm not sure I understand you. How is focusing your own work on the one platform you care about the same as being closed? Everything is still open, and if a platform wants to support GNOME, they are free to do the work themselves; I'm sure patches would be accepted.
The article is criticizing Apple for (reportedly) informing its AppleCare technicians to point users to antivirus products rather than helping them to remove the virus over the phone. The article backs off from that criticism and then moves the goal posts to a criticism of Apple for giving its users a false sense of security.

From what I've seen over the years, it's the Apple evangelists, more than Apple itself, that have been lulling other Mac users into a false sense of security. I also think that Apple's strategy with AppleCare is probably wise; a technician generally shouldn't attempt to do a malware cleanup over the phone, even if you're pretty sure that the version of the bug you last saw was easy to remove.

I think it's also worth pointing out that it took Microsoft a very, very long time to finally release a solid antimalware product. Given Apple's dedication to user experience, I have no doubt that, if this continues to be a problem, Apple will deal with it swiftly.

...I like to imagine that Jobs will call up some old friends of his and ask them to "break that asshole's fingers".
Etsy's statsd and Graphite.
http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...
"I have interviewed several times before and always flop on the 'fundamental questions'. Is there any further advice someone can give me? Thanks in advanced."

Have you considered learning the fundamentals? Its not a snarky comment I'm genuinely curious.

If you are programming, find you enjoy it, and wish to continue doing it for money, continuing education should be right up there on your list of things to do. (whether you have a Ph.D in CS or just a high school diploma, new stuff is coming out all the time).

There are a lot of free resources now online. You can get the syllabus and curriculum for classses that are taught in places like Stanford or MIT or UC Berkeley. So even if you spend the next two years of nights and weekends 'filling in the gaps' in your knowledge you will find that not only do you get better at your 'day job' but you will start aceing those 'fundamental' questions.

There was a time when to do this you would have to audit a class at a nearby university which imposed limits based on schedules, location, etc. But those times are behind us now. Take an old desktop machine from the e-waste dumpster behind some company, load up FreeBSD or Linux on it, and start doing the home work from some of these courses. The fundamentals are fundamentals because they apply universally, and you don't need a fancy rig to compare the performances of various sorts, or explore bloom filters, or key exchange algorithms. You can run MySQL on crappy hardware for the size databases you need to run to learn SQL.

Granted the assumption is that you can currently access the internet and you live somewhere that is currently consuming IT hardware (pretty much most of Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand. and the N. American continent).

If you are a 'Senior in college' and your major was CS and you flop the fundamental questions then there is a bigger problem here.
in terms of a real startup, i think its an awesome idea to send an email like the one were all waiting for a day later. cause i know many time i signed up for something like this saying "thats awesome! im gonna go on everyday" and then the next day its just forgotten......so this email will let me go to sleep, and wake up, and remind me of it again. genious!
Hence my question: what nice things?

Let me elaborate. Good Programmers write Portable Code. This means checking for supported features and using them if they exist, falling back to less desirable methods otherwise. So either the systemd guys are too lazy to do this (and therefore I probably don't want to run their code even if my OS is supported) or there is something linux has exclusively, that is so damn awesome that systemd would suck if it didn't have it. To my knowledge, group scheduling is not that awesome. In fact, as far as I know, freebsd's kernel and userland apis are superior to linux's in many ways, and if this is false, I would like very much to know why.

I was tempted to call gnome and systemd lazy, but thought I should learn more first.

Full disclosure: I don't run gnome (apart from gtk) and probably never will, but only as a matter of personal preference, not philosophy.
This is potentially huge. SSL latency is a big issue when you want to make your site load faster, and this would basically eliminate the biggest reason to not turn SSL on. If this becomes standard, I can't see any of my sites, at least, using plain HTTP by default.
I'm not a fan of watching video interviews in general, so I get a lot of value out of listening to the audio versions. Maybe you could give those a shot? They're full of really valuable information.
You can get Weihanstephaner in Germany. You shouldn't, but you can.
This is all part of the march to turn the Internet into Television 2.0. Everything is being channelized and controlled.
And the point is he didn't lose money. Other people bought the app who wouldn't, it seems, off the back of his generous gesture.

Note that this certainly would not work for a large company - it only works for a (very) small-scale outfit.
Privachi Scatters Your Data Online to Secure Your User Information
I a not disagreeing with the article and I would like to add: using Latex provides the same plain text advantages and after some learning curve you can do just about anything with it.
This is exactly why I don't run gnome: I don't like running a bunch of code that only serves to slow me down. I ran gnome on freebsd for a while and it was noticeably faster. This is due in part to the fact that I wasn't running all the crap ubuntu installs these days (why am I running a couchdb server on my laptop?), but also due to the fact that freebsd I think does a lot of things better, including fairer scheduling, and it has a sane init system.
The reason is because (in the absence of clairvoyance) the performance of stocks is evaluated over time. If the price is closer to $45 in a month or two, it'll be easier to say that today's price jump was an aberration. If the price is $180 in three months, it'll be possible to say that today's price is actually too low.
Don't the Bavarians have a beer-research facility in Weihenstephan?
I'm the author. I think you're conflating the SLA with the guarantees the cloud offers: one of the points I tried to make was that an SLA doesn't offer you any real guarantees; they only really benefit the service provider. If every SLA gave you a "50 times" penalty, as FathomDB is paying, then they would be interesting, because at that level the provider has to take uptime seriously.

In terms of who offers a better cloud, clouds based on OpenStack are 'the great hope'. IaaS is about commoditizing infrastructure, so open source seems necessary; rather than AWS's very closed, secretive approach.
Actually it's more like Velib for America, since Zipcar requires you to return the mode of transportation back to the same lot.
"Open" is about accessibility to the development process and result products. It's not about conforming to the broadest possible "port" base.

Frankly, if there's something that Gnome needs (or just can get significant value from) that is available on Linux but not other platforms, I see nothing wrong with abandoning those other platforms until/unless they catch up. That's just progress.

That said, I don't see any evidence that this is actually happening. The systemd proposal was just that (a proposal), and while systemd is a pretty invasive change to linux boot and daemon management it really doesn't seem like something that couldn't be abstracted by FreeBSD in a way that would work with Gnome.
some really great photos on this post
I know this isn't the main point, but Cydia does not offe r pirated apps. Most of the things available in Cydia are independant modifications to the system or a set of standard *nix utilities. Sure, a jailbreak makes piracy possible, but it's not about that. Cydia can't prevent piracy on a jailbroken device, but it does provide strong warnings against it (and, from the best statistics we have, people listen: less than half of the jailbreak users have pirated an app.)
But... I will say that I would be encouraged if I were a shareholder by this

Why else would a CEO say anything different? I've been through an IPO and basically heard the same thing from the CEO.
Pokemon For iPhone - Growing App Spam Example
This is a compelling issue, most of the ideas around hygiene are myths, and it isn't entirely too crazy to call this a mass ritualistic mutilation of men.
Why should it be bsd's job to port code they didn't write, when gnome can do it for far fewer man-months because they already know what will need porting? If gnome really wants some fancy linux feature, they can ask bsd to implement it. Is there a history of such requests going unserved? I doubt there is even a history of such requests.
I never had it. But I wonder why someone would want a filtered beer, when there's extra-cloudy stuff available.
Ask HN: Pitch your startup on 9Slides
if you have ever sent a pitch deck to investor over email, you know how it feels....You wish you can be there along with the presentation.

You have this opportunity now!!

Get your Pitch on to 9slides ( http://www.9slides.com/demo ) and send a link to your pitch instead of deck.

I can make your pitch private for you if you need it.

Just email me (ruchit@9slides.com) your login email ID at 9Slides and let me know when you are done uploading your content...
Bizoppers
This reads poorly.

FathomDB customers saw outages because the implementation Fathom did using MySQL on AWS went out when AWS went out.

So in conclusion Fathom is going to build something which Oracle, IBM, SyBase, and every other database company in the history of the planet has tried and failed to do, build a relational database on a distributed infrastucture that is more reliable than the underlying infrastructure? Uh, good luck with that. Seriously, its Turing Prize material if you succeed.

I was thinking the punch line would be "Gee Netflix uses AWS and they didn't go down so we're going to more what they did." I guess they are going to compete with MongoDB and Riak.
Moving into off-topic waters here (Edit: Erm, wrote it and it got quite long. Thought about scrapping it, but it might be either amusing or annoying to read. You judge): I guess I can give a very nice example for these kind of things..

I currently live in Cologne [1] (~1.000.000 people, west Germany) ~40km away from Dusseldorf [2] (~600.000 people, but capital of the state). These cities are the prime examples for rivalry between cities all over Germany. Both are cities that heavily rely on tourism, both are very much into carnival (one of the topics that are discussed to death) and both are _the_ place to be for (different types of..) beer.

Here you get 0.2l (i.e. tiny) glasses of rather light beer, brewed in a way that is even (as far as I know a first!) a protected regional trademark akin to Champagne. You can create it somewhere else, but you cannot use the name (a derivation of the name of the city, Koelsch [3, contains a reference to the rivalry as well]).

Dusseldorf is famous for (larger glasses, 0,3l or 0,5l) stronger (in taste), sweeter and dark beers. Not protected by law, but they are more or less _the_ city for these types of beer.

This leads to a lot of (mostly friendly) discussions like the one you used. In fact, since the local beer here is very light and served in these tiny glasses, ~most~ of Germany compares the 14 different brands of beer here to a kind of 'diluted water'.

It always amuses me (moved here, so I'm kind of an outsider) to see these kinds of discussions and I think like to be reminded (thank you!) that this is a global phenomenon..

1: http://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=de&...

2: http://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=de&...

3: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/K%C3%B6lsch_%...
I thought that SSL latency (and additional server load) was due to encryption overhead, not the handshake.
A little hint about whitespace
If you are writing PHP scripts, leave out the ?> at the end of the file. This is actually best practices. PHP will still compile normally and you won't have to track down stray whitespace which was printed because you accidentally had some after the ?>

If you are echoing with PHP inline with your HTML, put a space after the PHP:

<div>
<?php echo "blablabla" ?>_
</div>

See that _ ? That is supposed to be a space.

If you want to avoid crazy whitespace problems in your HTML, this is a good style to have:

<div some="attribute"
><some other stuff
></div>

I recently learned another style that some people employ, which may be cooler:

<div some="attribute"><!-- LINE BREAK
-->more stuff<!-- LINE BREAK
--></div>

i.e. filling the whitespace with HTML comments.

I definitely made such mistakes before.
Finally, the other way: sometimes you want to preserve whitespace and prevent word wrapping. In that case, convert all spaces to &nbsp and you will have unbroken lines. Can be useful for stretching elements!
Study Sees Credit Cards as ‘Choke Point’ for Spam
this is brilliant point that many founders underestimate. fairness and motivation. it happens left and right when inexperienced tech founders just "calculate" equity. it might be calulated 100% corectly and co-founder might agree with it, but something will "not feel right" for him and greatly affect his performance. please pay attention.
Twitter Engineering Blog: Faster Ruby (Kiji Update)
It's pretty typical to audit all your destination servers (which may number in the thousands) to ensure that they don't have private keys (the id_rsa) - in theory all they need is your id_rsa.pub.

Then, you only need to worry about securing your clients - and, it's typically difficult to wholesale (a) hack into all the clients, and then (b) yank the encrypted id_rsa off of them (as compared to hacking into a destination server, and then just wholesale waiting for people to login and grab their password). It's next to impossible in a secure environment (financial/medical/utility) where they have hardware dongles which contain their id_rsa. (Or, they move into a new class of secure, and use One Time Passwords, RSA Tokens)

Net-Net - multi-use static passwords are not used in secure environments.
I haven't read the bill, but does it really require court orders to be shown?

It really does. Read the full text at http://www.publicknowledge.org/files/docs/Bill-PROTECT-IP-Ac... to verify for yourself. Sections 3d and 4d say what courts can order companies like Google to do, and sections 3e and 4e say how to go about punishing Google if it fails to do what it was told to do under 3d and 4d respectively. (The difference between sections 3 and 4 is whether the lawsuit was brought by the attorney general or the copyright holder.)
Thanks for the good-luck wishes. Obviously it's a big undertaking, but we're seeing very promising results, so it's time to go all-in. Take that as you will :-)

Incidentally, Oracle and IBM both have clustered database products, though they can certainly be improved upon.
It depends where you hail from.

Brits and Americans will drink it because they have a HUGE advertising budget.

The Japanese won't drink it because imported beer is hellishly expensive and Asahi isn't that bad.

The French won't drink it, because wine is much cheaper and much better almost everywhere.

Germans won't drink it, because if you want something better then there's umpteen different domestic beers that are fresher, tastier or sharper. Especially Flensburger.

The Czechs won't drink it because they more or less invented clean, refreshing beers and their domestic beers are the only foreign beers that Germans will admit to being fantastic. Especially Pilsner Urquell.

Belgians won't drink it, because they only like beer that's made from raspberries, blueberries or pansies. I don't know why.

Americans or Brits who don't drink it suffer from 'intensely educated beer drinker' syndrome - sort of a "now you've seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?" aspect. American and British small breweries are fantastic, alas no huge marketing budget...

This leaves the vast majority of the beer-drinking market to make Stella Artois money hand-over-fist and puzzled at the rest of the world's intolerance. Truth is, it's not that bad - it's just that there are things that taste so much better without the stigma of a huge multi-national faceless corporation ;-)

TL;DR - Something like Windows vs. the rest of the world. The popular choice will always be sneered at by connoisseurs eager to distinguish themselves as educated.
if i were you, i'd simply resubmit your app, whilst you worked on a fix.

i had this with a previous project (rarara copyright!) and we resubmitted and got in
Justify with evidence please. Don't go spouting slanderous statements and have nothing to back them up with. If it's as obvious as you seem to be claiming then you shouldn't have any trouble backing up your point.

Google's policy isn't to be "good", it's to "do no evil" and they are very, very different things. This legislation is dangerous like a bomb. If you integrate a system that can drop an IP address from global DNS servers at will, then things are very dire.

Wikileaks got taken down enough as it was, but no one would have heard a peep if the DNS was dropped in seconds of being noticed.

Next step would be to force search providers to recognize 'infringing text' and have the DNS immediately taken down to stop the Streisand Effect.

Hello Egypt, Syria, heck the Middle Eastern Despots, you'll all have promising new positions in the US government very, very soon!
First and foremost, have you mentioned anything on your TOS which legally binds you for compensating users in such situations?

Assuming you are not legally bound, as a good gesture you can potentially extend services of your product by certain amount.

How much Amount is a tricky question, as this is very specific to how your user's perceived loss/impact when AWS was down.

I would probably try talking to some of the close friends who are also your customers and get an idea of what is good compensation.

Would love to hear what other think about this.
I have no idea. I do know that Weihanstephaner market themselves as the world's oldest brewery. Not the best. The oldest ;-)
William Gibson's cyberpunk classic 'Neuromancer' may finally get to screens
I love this. More info in the Google blog post: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/05/ssl-falsestart-performance-...
Hi Chad-- I've been looking for an app like this! I just sent Andrew @ Mixergy an email begging him to give you permission to include his feed. His blog is the reason I've been on the lookout for something like this... Any chance you'll be able to play his video interviews via the app too?
Kate Moss: Habla sobre Kate Middleton
This forbes blog suggests an auction would have been fairer, and I strongly agree. Institutional investors who got in on the IPO are just printing money, whereas a google-style auction would have given more of that money to the owners.

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/05/19/linkedi...
DOMready is obtrusive. Stop using it.
Paul Graham has a good essay on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html

I highly recommend reading his other essays as well.

I think Joel Spolsky also wrote on the subject.
The more I think about this scenario, the less sense this vehicle makes.

He says it needs about 300 feet to take off and land--any decent bush pilot can do that with the right plane, and the best can do far better[1]. A used bush plane probably costs about the same as one of these things, and you can go several times faster than 40 mph. You could carry a lot more stuff, too.

But what if the landing strip is any significant distance from the place you're trying to get to? Well, if all of the terrain in-between is unsuitable for landing (forest, jugle, or just plain rugged), it's probably too rough for a tiny little car like this, too. Even if you [i]could[/i] use the car mode to go that last mile or so, it would still probably be faster to fly the first several hundred miles of the trip in a bush plane and then go the last bit on foot (or mule, etc.) rather than fly the first part at 40 mph and drive the last bit.

If you're talking about shorter trips (tens of miles instead of hundreds) without roads, it would be cheaper, faster, safer, and more effective to just get a jeep.

Can anybody propose a (non-edge case) scenario where you wouldn't be better off with either a bush plane or a jeep?

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbHSRrcxzq8 (I should note that, while the plane in the first part only needs a few feet to get airborne, the part it doesn't show is where the pilot has to stay in ground effect to accelerate for another 200 feet or so before he can climb away.)
Microsoft closes consumer skunkworks unit
FWIW, I didn't get any further than the front page because I don't have (and don't intend to have) Silverlight installed.
Of course, exactly what constitutes a software patent is not defined here so the results are likely to be specious.
Which one are you more comfortable with? Python or PHP?

I have long gone the Django way, never looked back.

To be fair, there is one thing I regret in going with Django - our products written in Java always give the opportunity of exposition through heroic action to solve a problem with the products or the servers they run on. The Django systems never do that - they just keep working.
That's a fantastic idea. Go for it.
well, there's a couple of other things i need to fix anyway, so it will take a few hours of work before i can resubmit. so it can't hurt to knock out the copyright stuff in the meantime.