skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SOPA/Protect IP ACT: How to make a difference
I've seen a number of threads on Hacker News organizing resistance to these bills...it's a good first try. But Senators and House Reps deal with organizations like the NRA, the Tea Party and others which literally run campaigns for and against bills millions of times and have perfected it.

First, a point of clarification.
SOPA, or the Stop Online Privacy Act is the House of Representatives bill, H.R. 3261.
PROTECT IP ACT is the Senate bill, S. 968.
Your senator has no influence over SOPA and your House Representative can't influence the PROTECT IP ACT.
EVERY time you contact your senator or representative mention the BILL NUMBER! Think of them as users for your website/app/product. If they don't know what exactly they are supposed to do you lose them. In this case maybe you get a response back about an old net neutrality bill or something equally bizarre. The BILL NUMBER is how they keep track of interest in a bill. If they don't have it, it may not be tracked and counted.

Contacting your senator or House Rep by email, while useful is the least meaningful way to get their attention.
If x=the amount of influence your contacting them has this is how it would turn out:
Phone: 10000x, Letter: 100x, Email: 1x
By law, the representatives have to respond to mail. They don't to email, so if your email gets caught in the spam filter, you're out of luck.

Contacting your local representatives is most effective if the outreach comes in waves. If you can organize a call-in and fill up all the office lines that will get their attention. Another effective strategy is to ask your officemates to sign their own copy of a petition and say that you will collect signed copies the next day and mail them out (each person should print and sign 3, one for each senator and the House Rep). This comes with the benefit that all the letters arrive on the same day, forcing at least one aide to open 20-50 copies of the same letter one right after another. Repition is your friend

More info including the list of cosponsors, where the bills are in Congress and links to the full-text document are below:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968

Also for New Yorkers. BOTH SENATORS ARE COSPONSORS OF PROTECT IP ACT!
California: You have 8 House Reps co-sponsoring SOPA!
Block Proxy Server via .htaccess
I learned a bit of Korean script and could touch type in it on a US keyboard. It's a fairly nice system, although there seems to be a fair bit of non-rational pride in it, too. Woe to anyone that points out any similarities to previous writing systems...

But it's not just triplets. You can have 2, 3, or 4 components per character (Wikipedia says 5, but I'm not sure how that works). The first component must be a consonant, but there's a null consonant too, allowing you to create syllables with just a vowel sound.

I don't see how the writing system itself helps typists. If words are shorter, that's a function of shorter words, not the writing system. A syllable still requires several keystrokes each.

That said, it's very simple to learn. I learned it in a week. But, I also learned the Japanese scripts (hiragana/katakana) in a week as well using James Heisig's awesome book[1]. So, perhaps learning alphabet scripts is just not an overly difficult task in general?

1: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Hiragana-James-Heisig...
Can you pass the Harvard entrance exam from 1869?
Well, looks like I'll be moving all of my domains to a different registrar. Anybody have any suggestions for a good one?
I'm surprised that no JS template engines ever implement binding. It seems like everybody just ports some server-side ideas, even though there's a lot more that is possible client-side. Why do I need to rerender the entire template when my data changes?

Sproutcore2 is an example of this, but it's pitched as a full framework rather than a binding aware template engine.
It's not another JS template engine - it's a pure JS implementation of Mustache that's apparently significantly faster than Mustache.js.

They also support compiling of templates for deployment purposes, which is nice.
Could someone perhaps help me out re: the difference between Compiling and Rendering JS templates? What it feels like is this:

Compiling a JS template on the server gives you a template object that has a render() method. On the client side, you create an instance of the object and pass its render() method a context? Am I missing anything?

If anything, this looks like what I've been looking for to get my templates off my page and into a separate JS file. Makes things cleaner. And apparently faster?
Kindle Fire no longer blocks Android Market website
My old one simply had an "exclusions" clause where developers could register things that fell outside the 'IP agreement' terms. It wasn't perfect, but that type of thing is a good idea.

Technically, if you're consulting, then any code you produce is the IP of your clients (not you), and your company should be held accountable for any breaches/leaks of IP policy.

I think my old boss had a policy/contract agreement for clients, though, that copyright was owned by the client, and IP was owned by our company unless they specifically asked for it.

I know that this is probably missing the thrust of your question a bit, but aside from just protecting your developer's free time, you have to consider protecting your client's IP. If the IP agreement on that side is between client/company, then you're pretty much free to decide your own policies on your end, but you will have to be vigilant about checking the IP agreements of your clients (if they have them).

#EDIT: It's also a good idea to explain to your employees what exactly you're trying to protect, and let them know that unless they're going into direct competition with you on any systems developed internally, then you probably won't bother perusing any IP breaches. It'd have to be worth your while to waste money/time to chase them, and depending on "right to practice" laws (not sure what the real name is), you may not be able to stop them from building whatever they want anyway.
You probably will need to be able to program. You probably should know a little about how the web works, and a little about some sort of framework, and something about storing and accessing details in a database.

But all of that is minor to actually getting something running. Anything. Even if you have an idea and validate it by running a service by hand via email. If it starts getting popular (for which read - too much work to do by hand) then you need to automate. At that point you need to be able to code something, anything that works.

Then you need to improve like crazy. Get advice, get help, get a mentor, get a co-founder, or do it yourself.

But you still won't need detailed knowledge of algorithms, calculus, discrete math, etc.
The problem I see with this article is that it doesn't acknowledge you only need a handful of people to make the advances necessary to reach out to other civilizations. It does admit there will be variation, but talks about fundamentalists and anti-consumerism folks rather than committed scientists/researchers who will make the contact possible.

In our own history, you could argue that only a small set of outliers (the Einsteins, Darwins, etc.) really contributed to our major strides. If we're beaming signals to outer space today, you can track it back to only a few committed geniuses who made that feat possible.

So, if alien civilizations do exist, I'd say they likewise need only a handful of committed folks; and they will come about through natural variation regardless of what the societal attitudes are.
There are so, so many things wrong with this line of arguing presented as The Solution that I'll just present my two biggest. First, as a solution to the Fermi paradox this must mean that ALL the millions of species with quintillions of individuals MUST always prefer to retreat into virtual reality AND completely forget about reality.

Most putative solutions to the Fermi paradox have this problem. It isn't enough to create a way to eliminate 99.999% of millions of civilizations, because the result is still that the galaxy would have been colonized before we achieved sentience. Self-loathing arguments are a particularly popular one, but even striking a fashionable "humans suck" pose (and make no mistake that this is a fashionable signal to send) proves nothing else about the other beings that could exist.

Secondly, it must mean that all species that so retreat must so thoroughly retreat that they completely forget about the outside universe and have no desires to increase their computational power for any reason, ever. This is a much higher level of tech than we have now, and none of the quintillions-is-probably-a-conservative-estimate must ever decide that hey, that juicy looking star system over there could be converted to another hunk of VR simulation and if I send over the hardware to do it, I can completely own the resulting VR installation.

(Personally I favor the other end of the argument; life evolves easily, assuming Earth-like conditions, and the Rare Earth hypothesis doesn't require very much hoop-jumping, new physics, or bizarre probability arguments, it just requires serious consideration of the possibility that organic life-as-we-more-or-less know it may really be the only solution, and may really not be able to arise in very many places. If you dig into the prevailing wisdom against that idea, you'll find it's more philosophically sourced than scientifically sourced, there really are a lot of good reasons to think there aren't that many available chemical regimes life could work in, and in general it's probably the most scientifically-sound Fermi paradox answer. It's just not philosophically fashionable.)
Only one mathematical rule required

Income >= Expenditure
So if a company starts infringing trademarks, polluting search engines en masse, tricking people into buying their rubbish, phishing their details, getting credit card details etc, you'd be fine with that?

What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?

How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc

Those are all "Open Internet", but they're also not very nice.

I don't think it's as clear cut as some make it.

I don't know if SOPA gets it right or wrong, or if the current laws are sufficient, but I'm glad we have some of those laws in place to make the internet a slightly nicer place.
Why The Linux Desktop Still Rocks
Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai - Most Expensive Hotel Wallpapers, Photos
Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai - the only 7-star luxury hotel in the entire world. It was designed by Tom Wright of WS Atkins PLC. At 321 metres (1,053 feet), it is the tallest building used exclusively as a hotel. Burj Al Arab Hotel looks like a Boat Sailing The Ocean. It stands in the sea on an artificial island 280 metres (919 feet) away from the beach in the Persian Gulf, connected to the mainland only by a private curving bridge. It is one of the most expensive hotels in the world to stay in. The prices for the least expensive suites are in the range of $1,000 to over $6,000 a night. The most expensive suites can cost over $15,000 a night. Below are some amazing look photos/pictures of Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai.
If you wonder what where the hell the atrocious __doPostback, __EVENTTARGET, and (gag) __VIEWSTATE come from... the answer is .NET WebForms.
I have a few go daddy domains. Where should I move my .it domains to?
Works pretty well, actually. Calendar isn't perfect, but I personally prefer the UI to exchange.
Compiling is nice. Not a big fan of Mustache though, the tags look like Brainfuck to me.
I thought research hub had collaboration spaces for labs https://hub.berkeley.edu/
As the other posters here were saying, wages for the young are already very low. The problems are more structural, as technological change is changing what skills are needed, and some countries like Spain just had a huge property boom so everyone was trained for the construction business, which was a complete waste of resources. Existing businesses may never hire these people, so a lot of new businesses are needed, which takes time and capital, and a startup culture that much of southern europe does not have much of. Emigration is the current solution for many people instead.
As I understand it SOPA results in a shift of the burden for policing content from registrars and hosts towards government bodies and the administrators of the DNS system. Alternatively-framed bills introduced in the name of combating piracy could have much more damaging implications for Godaddy.
I love Wells. In what book might I find such analogy?
Really amazing how quickly they slid after Android and iOS took off. I would not have believed it had I not witnessed it. It's really a lesson to all established technologies... you can fall faster than you ever realized.
Well, in many regions, trash collection is a municipal monopoly, so your customers are going to be city councils, not people.

Also, in many places, "curbside sorting" of the type you describe already takes place. Here in Norway, I get three trash bins from the city-- one for regular trash, one for paper, and one for food trash. About 25 years ago I lived in Montpelier, Vermont and there we had two streams-- one for recyclables like paper, plastic, and metal cans, and one for everything else. Both of these are based on weekly pickups-- daily pickups would be prohibitively expensive, it seems to me, and would also enlarge the environmental footprint (in terms of fuel required.)
It will be a shame if they fail because OS 2 has the potential to be amazing, making "real time" really work on mobile, thanks to it's multi kernel architecture. Some detail here - http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-playbook-f222/qnx-mi...

Can imagine UIs that adapt to your current location and environment as you move around.
My list of what should be legally restricted in its availability is as follows:

1) Child pornography

End list.

National security is not enough of a reason for restrictions. Copyright is not enough of a reason. Further, the assumption that corporations or governments have exclusive moral authority to determine what constitutes impermissible material is, frankly, ridiculous. Giving them the authority to make such decisions is destructive, to both freedom and economy.
I have a Blackberry for work. It's fine. It receives emails. It makes phone calls. It makes a noise when I have a meeting.

An amazing work of art it is not, but it does work well enough. So I agree with the OP, it's uninspired but it's not horrible. It's a minimum viable product.
This is a good suggestion , as the Chris Pine book is a very easy, quick read.

Also, the O'Reilly Head First books are usually good - with a fairly light-hearted, humorous approach for starters - and their "Head First Programming" book is Python based. ( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802387.do?sortby=publ... )

Does it have to be a book ? Maybe a subscription to something like Code School ( http://www.codeschool.com ) would also be quite cool, as they have courses like "Try Ruby" and "Rails for Zombies" .
Why would anyone think this is to avoid lock-in? If you're writing something to manipulate the Word document model using the Word API, it's unlikely you're going to be able to retarget that code to some other system. Just like if you use the Java libraries, it doesn't matter if the language is portable - you're still going to need Java to run the code against.

What they are trying to accomplish is simple: Keep more people using Office. JavaScript and HTML seem to be gaining more traction, so it makes perfect sense Microsoft would want their products accessible for such developers. What other reason would there be?
Or if you follow a deal website, you'll be notified when they are running a $1.18 coupon.
"""Replace fast food with any other activity which offends commonly accepted political decency."""

Obesity doesn't only offend "commonly accepted political decency" it also has measurable, negative impact on a person's life span.

And I would venture to say that nuclear weapons and such have too.
These are horrible reasons to not stand up for what you think is right.
S/he's saying you should only buy things on which you're pretty sure they're losing money, so that you're actively hurting them by buying them. It's like buying a PS3 and never buying any games - I suspect people buying PS3's by the truckload to use as Linux clusters is what made Sony pull the Linux support.
Readied To Donate Organs, 21-Year-Old Emerges From Coma
The answer is much more simple. Let us assume that every 1000 solar systems has one system with intelligent life on it.

#1 given normal known methods of space travel, it would take generations to reach the nearest planet possibly containing life.

#2 given time, there is a VERY small possibility that when we arrive at that planet it has intelligent life. Intelligent life may have died out, or it may be currently evolving. Or by the time we reach it they may have up-and-left.

#3 The chances of crashing into another alien vessel in space is almost 0. Infinitely improbable. Therefore to actually meet another alien vessel, aliens must have traveled to the same planet at the same time as us. Given the vast distances this is highly unlikely.

#4 We don't have "lifesign" scanners like in star trek. Determining that a planet has advanced technology would mean going to the dark side and looking for lights. If the culture is not yet advanced enough, then we won't find enough of it to be visible from space.

#5 while talking about #4, atmospheric conditions may make it very difficult to see anything on the surface.

#6 given all above, what is the probability that a race of aliens got to earth (within the last 300 years)? Otherwise earth would look like a habitable planet, but no sign of advanced intelligent life. I'd say I have a higher chance of winning every lottery in the world on the same day.
Same thing's true for their SSL certificates. $12 if you Google, $60+ if you don't.
I would personally add

2) Websites that are known for mallware, phishing, or otherwise going to mess you up.

As I said I don't know if SOPA is good/bad, but my point was that "I support an Open Internet" is a bit of a cop out.
I've heard many people mention namecheap and dreamhost as good alternate registrars that charge about the same as godaddy.
Corporate fraud vs Anonymous Analytics Group
You are misreading the clause.

It is talking about "confidentiality obligations", not "confidential obligations." That is, obligations to keep information confidential, not obligations that are themselves confidential.

And below, they define confidential information clearly:

'"Confidential Information" means information disclosed by a party to the other party under this Agreement that is marked as confidential or would normally be considered confidential under the circumstances. Customer Data is Customer's Confidential Information.'

They explicitly state that "Customer Data is Customer's Confidential Information." They are indeed saying that if they release the contents of an email, and it costs you a million dollars, then they are liable for that.
The purpose of loss-leading products/services is to get consumers to purchase other things and that is where they make a profit. If a large enough group only purchases loss-leading products/services and don't purchase anything else, GoDaddy should be at a loss.... until they change their pricing models, and then you can just boycott them all together.
War of the worlds. Right on the first page.
I love Dropbox and use it on all my devices. However, I really wish they would implement permissions on shared folders. It's one of the two most requested features that users want, but they still won't implement it [https://www.dropbox.com/votebox].

As soon as someone comes along that has integrates as seamlessly on my Windows PC, Linux PC and Android phone AND offers permissions on shared folders I will jump ship.

I don't know why, but it actually makes me cross that they aren't listening to their user-base.
Just to clarify a quote: “Everything will be based on performance — how fast they code, how many they get right.”

This is a slight misrepresentation of the original intent. What we meant to say is that we measure code execution speed, not how fast people type.
http://www.turdhead.com
Amazon taking control of the entire delivery chain in India
It's a risky proposition. Blackberry is software. Buying other people's software and reselling it makes you an easy-to-eliminate middleman.

HTC and Samsung like Android because they hate writing software (although not enough to stop doing it) and Android is much better than anything they could dream of making themselves. RIM, on the other hand, has already made pretty decent software. So it would be weird to throw all that away and start making low-margin hardware that competes with 100 other low-margin phones and tablets.
I have been using GoDaddy for years. I'm just using it for a simple webpage+domain hosting and email. It works but I'm probably being overcharged since I don't bother with coupons. I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks.
One of the things I've noticed with my very limited knowledge of Chinese is that it's a fantastic language for poetic expression. Each Chinese character is a single syllable, so you can have a poem that consists of 4 lines, each with 6 syllables, and convey a huge amount of meaning.

In a language like English, 6 syllables won't get you nearly as much meaning.

I've noticed that Chinese pop music seems to have much more expressive, poetic lyrics, even in stuff aimed at a mass audience. A good example is Faye Wong's song "Sky". For a puff pop song the lyrics are quite poetic when translated into English. It's hard to think of an equivalently poetic English language song aimed at such a large audience.
The Greek debt negotiations haven't finished, and while the private sector bond holders may get 50% losses, Greece will not cut 50% of its debts, as the official lenders are not taking losses. Greece would be better off simply defaulting fully, as it will still end up with government debts of 150% of GDP or so after default.

Also if the countries default the banks do too, as they hold a lot of the government debt - it was a mutual game.
"""This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook (http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th...) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it)."""

Yeah. So on top of owning an iPhone, you are also a hipster with a (trendy but useless, considering the iPhone also tells the time) watch and a notebook (it's even a Moleskine).

Way to prove the parent poster's point.
> No need to have any recourse there?

I'm not sure why you'd say that, when the parent says

> and I'm ok with the fact that in some cases this can bring consequences.

Bad stuff happens on the Internet. People need a way to stop that bad stuff happening. SOPA is not that way.
You're forgetting the people and companies that bought domains back in the early 2000s who now have dozens or hundreds of domains on GoDaddy. People stay because it's easier than transferring. A lot of people still use them even for new domains because they're still the cheapest game in town.
Self-Image of Linux Geeks
It's never going to work anyway unless they put a roof on that thing.
Yes, namecheap is good and it as a simpler interface than Godaddy, which is way too cluttered.