skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe it.

Just two months ago I received one of these letters alleging I downloaded a game over BitTorrent, showing an IP address and how many bytes of the file I supposedly seeded.

Problem was it wasn't my IP and I had never heard of the game. I had to fax Comcast's "Security" department to verify that the IP address in question had never been assigned to a modem on my account...

Yet Comcast told the copyright holder I was their John Doe.
I take issue with that $15,000 number. According to:

http://www.indexcreditcards.com/creditcarddebt/

revolving consumer debt (of which credit card debt is a large but strict subset) was only $7400 per household in November 2010 and I doubt it's doubled since then.

Indeed, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/Current/ suggests it has gone down somewhat since then.

Still crazy high, of course. I can imagine how an emergency situation might cause someone to have to spend more money on a credit card than they have in their savings account. I can't imagine how the average person manages to get into that situation, though.
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You don't need to be 100% sure of winning, only more sure than the person suing you. Well, that's probably saying too much. Let's look at a few scenarios and see what comes out. In this case big means someone with lots of money, little has not so much. Being in the right means being more likely to prevail in a trial - this could be represented by a percentage. We also need to consider that there are people who are not very realistic in assessing the strength of their case. Let's call them irrational. That gives us the following possibilities:

A. big v. big
B. little v. little
C. big v. little

1. big is clearly in the right (>90%)
2. bis is probably in the right (>50%)
3. little is probably in the right (>50%)
4. little is probably in the right (>90%)

a. party in the wrong is rational
b. party in the wrong is irrational

So which combination benefits more from loser pays? My contention would be that any situation involving 1 or 4 very likely settles right away and those with 2 or 3 very likely don't get brought up in the first place.

This is already much longer than I meant to get into but I think there would be an overall benefit in moving to loser pays.
What I like on SO is how their search works with multiple tags. It's very effective.
Does anyone know of any blogs from YC founders that cover the personal struggles and conquest of these final 2 weeks before Demo Day? I think it would be a great read (even if they were bit sized entries) to find out what it's like to be under such enormous pressure but on the precipice of your big moment.
Yes, you are right, thank you for catching that.
google app engine is rock solid since high replication database migration. and even rdbms is coming. and go language is also supported if you need some serious calculations. If you are not using gae, you are stupid.
And they can not close over $this, which is annoying.
Yeah right: kill people for taking worthless material things...
It goes something like:

a b c d e f g

becomes:

a.b(c).d(e).f(g)
That was absolutely stunning. I can't even imagine someone pinning their entire hard-earned fortune on a wing and a prayer, but that's exactly what he did. Talk about balls.

Better still his start-ups are actually changing the world for the better. They're not just a bunch of smartphone apps. Today I toast the man who believed in solar power, space exploration and electric cars so much that he put he was willing to put his entire 8 figure fortune of 2 decades on the line! Elon, you're a tribute to the human spirit!
The juxtaposition of the top two stories, "How to Level Up as a Developer" and "Gamification is bullshit," is pretty hilarious.
Yeah I was trying to use it before, it's not doing anything.
This seems to me to take up a similar space in javascript as velocity and freemarker do for Java. They attempt to make programming simpler for designers to work with and instead end up with a language that is too complicated for a designer and a completely new syntax for an engineer. Now, it takes more time for anyone to work with it.

For example, no need for var declarations. Well, wait a minute, how do I as an engineer scope a variable then? In javascript, scope is determined by functions when using a var and is global otherwise. Are all variables global? Or are they just in a namespace? Or are they all scoped as if they had var in front? Things like this will trip me up all the time and I will always have to refer to documentation.

For designers, mostly they don't want to work with functions and variables anyway, how big of a benefit is it that they don't need a var and there is only one way to declare a function? Learning this language seems like it would take the same amount of overhead as learning identical features in javascript. Why not just learn a subset of javascript instead?
How could undecidable problems possibly be a sub-set of NP-Hard problems? All the complexity classes fall within the realm of computable problems.
Meteorite/comets hitting the sphere of the Earth. The sperm reaching the egg cell. The answer to the beginning is at the beginning.
'do things that are unnecessary' - that's a pretty bold statement. who are you to decide?
Without algorithms, you are limited to solving problems that can be tackled with mere plumbing.

You are right that there are lots of such problems. But there are also many others who can solve them too.
You can always add functions via mixin. I'll see what I can do about the warnings.
While there may be merit in the idea that consumer debt makes people happier or even is in their best interests, I’m not sure that “the evidence of their own actions” is sufficient to persuade me. Not far from where I live I can find people selling themselves to starngers for crack money. I observe people smoking cigarettes.

People do things that are I believe are harmful to their own interests, and I stop short of embarcing an amorality where aiding and abetting them for my own gain is right since they have free will and make their own choices.

The do believe they are better off. I think I understand their values. I do not ignore their priorities. But that doesn’t mean I always agree with them. Crack addicts and smokers, that is. I don’t have as rigid a belief about credit card debt, I’m just pointing out that “Evidence of their own actions, values, and priorities” does not persuade me in and of itself.
It puts pressure on both sides.

For example, The Hurt Locker is suing about 25,000 people. It's really unknown (both to the people they're suing and to The Hurt Locker) whether or not the case will succeed. Right now, there's a huge incentive for the individual to settle since the case might see the individual lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. With loser pays, maybe the loss goes from $100,000 to $120,000. However, on the other side, courts might start finding that The Hurt Locker has no case. In a loser pays system, The Hurt Locker could then be out the $20,000 for every suit they've filed.

It puts pressure on people filing a case to make sure they have a good case and aren't just trying to extort a few grand out of someone that will have to pay more money to defend in court. It puts pressure on defendants that are actually in the wrong to settle for a reasonable amount. In cases like this (where we might not have a great indication of where courts will go), it puts pressure on both sides not to overreach. The Hurt Locker wouldn't be suing 25,000 people if they might be on the hook for paying those people should a court decide against them. They'd be more cautious - test the waters, see what happens.

Loser pays is generally seen as protecting the small player. First, they can't claim unreasonable legal fees - they're often decided by the court. Second, usually loser pays incorporates the amount sought. If they're seeking $100,000 and they get awarded $10,000, they're the loser (even though they won an award). That would keep them from asking for too much in their suits since a jury might award actual damages and a little bit more. Likewise, in some areas arbitration processes are used in the process. For example, two legal teams sit down with the arbitrator who looks at stuff and determines an amount $X that seems fair. You think you deserve $10X so you go to trial. You only get $X. You wasted the court's time and money and are on the hook.

It puts pressure on people who are in the wrong to settle and puts pressure on those in the right to accept reasonable offers. Right now, there's no real reason not to sue. The Hurt Locker is pushing out these suits since it's a little administration without a downside. If they could be on the hook for thousands of dollars to those they're trying to sue, they'd think twice about it, about the amount they sued for, and about whether they were sure about the strength of their case.
I think you have a good point here. The list has too many items framed as "write an application..." The building blocks section should include some harder problems like optimization, planning, or code analysis.
Fair enough. I wrote that as I'm sitting here trying to puzzle out my very first project that requires me to use Windows (C# for Drupal developers anyone?), which is taking me away from really learning JS beyond jQuery to try and understand Node. I just can't imagine having the time to get through 10% of this list in the next 5 years.
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Spot on. Listen to this person. This is the voice of most of London at the moment other than the iPhone wielding, wine swilling, bugaboo shoving middle to upper classes.
saw that changing yesterday. one post had regular tags, the following one had that monstrosity.

scared the hell out of me.

for now I'm thinking it's not necessary at all. just matching synonyms would suffice. don't have to show them on screen like that.
That could explain why using mmap is faster than read in general, but what about skipping bytes? It sounds to me like if the seek distance is less than a page size, the kernel would need to fill the entire page with data.

Then again, hard drives return minimum sized blocks of data anyway, which is sized in kilobytes. So I'm guessing the "skipping" is a performance benefit only as so far as user space goes.

One would really have to grep a long string to be able to skip more than a block/page!
raganwald and Ezku hit the nail on the head. Most of my work spans PHP and JS, so having consistency (something the PHP array functions particularly lack) is a big win.
Absolutely. Also, for those not necessarily familiar with the composition of outer space: hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water are all relatively common "out there", as in "in the spaces between planets and stars and everything else.
Restaurants do this all the time in Sweden with waitresses, except they say "You were not what we were looking for." instead.
I understand that the UI will not be native, but it is very possible to create nice UI with Qt. Just look at the N9 and the apps therein, which uses Qt only for the UI. With QML/QtQuick, it's even very easy to build nice UIs.
I love intents on android, its a really method of inter app communication.

I havent spent a lot of time thinking about security implications, but would this work as an ultra easy mechanism for integrating payment solutions?, just send off a "payme" intent and get back a confirmation of payment
5000% Increase in the sale of baseball bats on Amazon.co.uk
The likelihood that I'll downvote goes up by about %300 when the comment leads with "I know I'll get downvoted...". Quite aside from the fact that it detracts from the actual point, it comes off as karma begging. It's a lot like begging for compliments, and it comes off as petty.
This will be even more aesthetically pleasing once PHP 5.4 is released with support for array literals:

__::map([1, 2, 3]), function($n) { return $n * 2; });
__([1, 2, 3])->map(function($n) { return $n * 2; });

That, combined with array dereferencing (ie, explode(",",$str)[0] ), PHP will start to look a lot like JavaScript.
Suster doing what he does best: great insight and synthesis. Mixture of macro-Econ and startup-micro. Worth the read.
It seems that it's fixed in PHP5.4; $this is the object in which you defined the closure by default, and you can re-bind it to any other object.
I would say that Angry Birds was an exception to this rule, however... and a lot of Indie games are similar. They may have a spike at first, but if and when they do get picked up by Joe Public, they have a slow but steady rise in sales.
Ask: Webapp related - Free and Paid seperate sites
Hi,
I have a web application that is very easy to deploy (php+mysql). It is easy for me to run couple of live sites using this application.

currently I provide free access on my main site.
When I have all the stuff ready to collect payments, is it a good idea to direct users to a different domain for paid access.

for e.g Free access remains at mockuptiger.com

and when users want paid access they go to someothersite.com

Users can easily export and import their data from the free version.

Most of the paid sites do offer the free access on the same domain and as part of the same instance.

I want to discuss the pros and cons.

Pros: I can focus on paid users to provide better site performance and support

What are the cons of this approach?

Has anyone done this before?

Thank you
Nilesh
oh...that gave me idea for a listapp where people add item and vote them up down. ( checklist for visiting africa, checklist for launching new app , checklist for organizing wedding. crowd sourced wisdom. )
MIT develops a portable, high-resolution 3D imaging solution
Sounds like they're just firing her but want to make it less emotionally "unpleasant" so they're calling it the end of her evaluation period. Kind of a lame thing to do.
I suspect Google is more interested in tying to their services rather than having the user make their own app choices. Additionally, desktop OSes require a higher level of support than Google is willing to provide (they might actually have to provide some support as opposed to now, which is apparently nil).
You are right: to give more prominence to the content as opposed to the callouts (follow us, and give us your email).
Don't they treat seeding the same as uploading?
If you would like to try the site out, send me an email and I can send you an access code: aaronlerch at gmail
I agree, I rarely see more than two large CTAs on a page. Usually it's just one large CTA with smaller CTAs sprinkled on various parts of the page.
London Police to Arrest Tweeting Looters
It seems pretty clear that public companies (with recent IPOs especially) are most affected; seed stage the least. Raising a seed or A round really shouldn't be any different (the sums involved are smallish for the funds, even with multiple investments and reserves), but it's entirely possible it will be (or, that it will be used as an excuse).

I'm going to hypothesize that the push to cloud, and need for improved computer security, is a much much stronger positive trend than the current economic issues. I'd be more concerned if I were a B or IPO stage company which relied on local/state/federal government sales (e.g. some kind of government-optimized CRM), or maybe an expensive consumer product. Genuine luxury seems like it should do ok, especially non-deferrable luxury servies, but "aspirational luxury" for middle class and lower class might suck. However, really cheap entertainment might win, too -- much better to be video games than movies in a downturn.
It doesn't bother you that photo-sharing web sites don't use the same simple organization scheme you use locally, but require you to create albums, etc.?
How can I add a mixin to the __ class without editing it ?
Sounds like Apple is doing a ton of things right, actually. Even tried to hire the guy!
Just make sure you get the right The Road to Reality. This one is going to disappoint: http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-COMING-JESUS-UNREAL/dp/15....
Because everyone needs a finger to point and a scapegoat to blame other than their own ignorance and apathy.
There is no reason to keep in an company that treats a employee like this, or at least make you feel so uncomfortable and worried.
What did her contract say?
It means that the components of life are a "naturally" occurring things, which appear all over the universe, and do not require life to produce them. This in turn implies that life, not just any life, but carbon based, DNA using life, could be more common in the universe then previously thought. And this implies that we here on Earth are even less of an unique snowflake then we thought.
Yes. Google will (sometimes?) display what you put into <meta name="description" content="here" /> as abstract on the search results page. This makes it very easy to optimise what people see on there instead of making Google guess what to show.
Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic
I totally agree. Personally, I've been using checklists. I use them to remind myself to put good architecture in place. I use them to remind myself to check for common bugs (calling functions or methods of null objects, forgetting to update the database schema when I update the model, etc). I use them to remind myself to go ahead and add the sorts of features that make a new feature more complete (email alerts, audit trails, reporting, etc). It may be a basic step, but it makes the development and testing go much more smoothly, and in my opinion, most web devs would become better developers faster by boning up on the basics than by learning more advanced subjects like algorithms and functional programming.
Has it ever actually happened that a developer had 10 years experience building websites on MySQL, very strong domain expertise in some non-programming field, and no knowledge of InnoDB?
Or just normal folks planning to defend their own homes. Rioters don't need to buy weapons, they loot them. If I were in London I'd be buying weapons too.

The only thing that disappoints me is the prevalence of baseball bats and paucity of cricket bats. C'mon Poms, defend your homes like Englishmen!
This article is a great example of why I tend to not like Wired commentary on technology and its social impact.

> Why Has BlackBerry Been Blamed for the London Riots?

Link-bait/troll headline? Check. [AFAICS nobody is "blaming" BlackBerry/RIM. All media outlets are merely reporting that BBM has been widely used to plan some of these riots.]

> BlackBerry has been under pressure to respond.

Unfounded claims? Check. [Have they been "under pressure"? Not really, they've stepped up voluntarily to assist the authorities.]

> Widespread calls to block BBM [...]

Hyperbolic extrapolation from useless data point? Check. [The link in the article within that text leads to a website with a single user-submitted post, with 2 (two!) comments - hardly widespread.]
By uploading I also mean seeding
I would expect Amazon to make a statement saying they wont ship them, now this has hit the press.

EDIT judging from hullo's comment above they have pulled all these products. Not sure why this comment is getting so many downvotes, it is a PR issue not a law enforcement issue, if the press are calling the company over this and it is going to be in the papers they will do this.
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Such as Microsoft Bob?
Andy Serkis: Can't a Guy With an Ape's Face Get Some Oscar Respect?
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RIM have likely already complied with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA):

See also: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/500-words-into-the-future-10014...
What would be neat instead of filling out a bunch of questions and then getting results would be to list one question at a time and have it adjust your estimated totals as you complete questions. You could spin it positive by listing your savings, starting with $0 and as people fill in information, have it raise their savings based on the information they fill in. And don't require people to fill in all of their information, allow them to bail out at any time and go get the insurance. You could even have people enter their current rate and compare what you can get them against that, so they see themselves saving more and more. That would actually end up being kind of fun to fill out, and I would be enticed to enter more and more information to see if I saved more. If I do not save more, I would want an indication of why for that question I did not save more. You could contract with a game designer for this, since they have experience making things fun.
Apple bringing secure email to the masses with iOS 5
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While NASA's discovery of nucleobases as opposed to amino acids is certainly interesting, there's a long way between "hey, nucleobases on an asteroid," and "wow, the entire genome of a living creature." There's a big jump in complexity, structure, and organization between organic chemistry and the multi-trillion cell organism we call homosapien.

The comparison in complexity is the rough equivalent of finding a few MOV/JMP/ADD instructions in a random text file as opposed to the source tree for the Linux kernel (I might be underestimating the human genome a little here).
What are your questions about it? I know two startups friends did that used it (one I was a part of), and the program is exactly as advertised. All the software+licenses, free for use until you either pass the 3 year (IIRC) mark or several million in revenue. It also now comes with some free Azure time.

If you can stand the HN karma deduction of using the MSFT platform, it's a pretty fantastic deal. Oh, and the program administrators are less picky with how "real" you are than, say, becoming a registered iOS developer (having gone through both processes myself).
I agree to treat it like a firing, and that she should move on. This just sounded super fishy -- I'll ask her about the contract/agreement.

Some time ago, when my wife got pregnant, she was let go from her job and they specifically told her it was because she was pregnant. She filed suit against them (ongoing) because they specifically said it was due to the pregnancy.

Sometimes companies do really shady stuff (like to my wife) and potentially hiring people for 4-month stints. Other times, they could just be using this as an "easier" way to fire someone - which is a bit passive aggressive.

I'll have to find out which it is in this case.
Just forcing a company to say "We expect X amount of growth in the next financial quarter, and the reason we expect this amount of growth is - even though we are an international financial corporation - guesswork and gut feeling, rather than any kind of formal model" would be a step forward.

You have two companies. Both predict X growth. One provides a full model which backs up their prediction. The other flat-out states that they made the number up. Which would you pick? It doesn't actually matter - the point is that their operations are more transparent and your choice is more informed.
That implies you're keeping such information with my session (across requests). Is that the case? I may just be misunderstanding.

If so, you need to encrypt it first. Storing sensitive data in the user's session is akin to writing it to disk in plaintext.
I'll find out tomorrow.
From the linked document, it looks like the bulk of the alleged content is for various adult titles. Who wants to go to go to court for allegedly sharing "Don’t Tell My Wife I A$$ed The Babysitter" (1257 users)?

Given the choice of an publicly embarrassing allegation vs. paying "damages", it is no surprise that so many are settling rather than going to court.
It depends how bad the enforcement tools are. They may make no distinction between uploading and downloading, just output a list of IP addresses that are part of the swarm.
Why do the ISPs keep the DHCP logs?
Reliance launches a New 3G Tab in India worth Rs 13000
Raw Strings: writing reader extensions for Racket
Leave it to a guest writer to post the best TC article I can remember in ages.

Excellent article, do yourself a favor and give it a read.