skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: www.sopajs.org - simple SOPA banner for your website
Y'all,

I've been reading about the "nuclear option" that some internet giants are considering in order to highlight SOPA and I wondered why they didn't just put a banner saying to "Pay attention to SOPA" on their sites.

I realized that it would only take a bit of time to build the service, so I did. It's built with Python, App Engine (my first time using it), Twitter's Bootstrap and GitHub. Has some rudimentary geolocating included so that politicians can be highlighted.

It's a very early version (ie. I only have data for CA politicians), but I figured HN would enjoy seeing it early, especially since it needs more love around:

* Increasing the list of SOPA supporters.
* Improving styling.
* Increasing functionality.

Usage: just add the following to your page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//sopajs.appspot.com/sopa.js">
</script>

Site: http://www.sopajs.org

Code: http://github.com/sopja/sopajs

* Bonus points to the first person to point out that the domain is registered on GoDaddy...
"Nokia, especially in Europe, has a lot of satisfied customers(The dumbphone market)."

In a couple of years, there won't really be a dumbphone market in Europe, except for drug dealers and the poorest of consumers. Already, more than half of all cellphones sold in Europe are smartphones, and it increases by 10 percentage points a year.

Nokia's future lies in selling dumb phones to third world countries, and that's already where it makes its money. Nokia was smart to have Microsoft fill their coffers, but in the end, smartphones will never be Nokia's core business.
IIS and nginx are too close in this graph. It looks suspicious.
Tst has been doing statistics on the significance of donations on one's support of SOPA over in another HN story that you might find more enlightening than this non-story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3439840

"You can see quite easily that there's a difference which is also significant (95%, t = -4.73)."
Awesome start!
There are times when a company needs a "rock star," and there are times when that's the last person you want to hire. It takes all kinds, and there is work that is enjoyable for all kinds. If you aren't inclined to stuff that is currently considered cool, you won't get the cool jobs. If what you want is a rewarding and successful career, look for jobs that suit you, that you enjoy, that you are good at. Then build on that. There are a lot of people who have made very solid and successful careers out of stuff that some think is boring.
I think you mean the file name, not the contents.
This is a long video, but it starts at about 3 minutes in, and you can skip the last 2 minutes, so it's only about 20 minutes.

And it's packed full of recognizable situations, funny observations, and, most of all, lessons for everyone who writes software for others.
This is accurate. Ethan Zuckerman has more commentary on the topic here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/12/28/exploring-the-...
Hidden features? Really? yield, ?? operator, @ "operator" for raw strings, nullable types, etc, are considered as "hidden" / advanced features?

I don't want to sound snobbish, but at least 90% of that list I consider as a basic C# knowledge. If you don't know how to make an enumerable with yield, or insert some debug code with DEBUG or guard resource with using(), what exactly you know?
Not sure why it's front page and getting upvoted when it doesn't do anything at all. Seems like a good idea though if it works, curious to see what sort of things it checks for.
These "Programming is like $game" where game is almost always Legend of Zelda is getting tiring.

Might as well have a "Software Manager training from The Belmont Family: Crack that Whip"... (Belmont is from the Castlevania Series games).

Really, there isn't that much of a takeaway from this article. All of Dave's points are pretty much common sense in terms of programming and 'getting things done'. The only new content is a new critique about TLOZ.
Seems to me that no matter what the language du jour may be, games are still often written in c++. When you're not getting the performance out of the tools you're using and you've spent some time trying to work around the problems, I think it's the right call to switch tools.
If it's better in Slovenia, then I'm glad. Not trying to imply anything and I apologize if I caused offense.
In my opinion, the engine of Waterloo's success is the university's unique co-op program. UW operates on a four-month rotating co-op system, each student does four months of school, then four months of internships, repeat for the duration of their degree. Many of us land in the Valley, or NY, or London, and bring what we learn back here. Most of my friends have multiple google/facebook/valley start-up internships on their resume by the time they graduate.

I was a little disappointed that they didn't mention our vibrant start-up scene. I write this now from Velocity, the university's start-up incubator, from which four YC companies have graduated. There are Union Square and Sequoia-funded companies in town, and we account for every Google acquisition in Canada, ever.
you don't have to threaten to leave to get a raise; you talk with your manager and tell him what you think you're worth and why its important to you that you make that, and you have a conversation about it. maybe you haven't demonstrated that you're worth it (go get a blog, speak at a user group, go earn your credibility). maybe the organization doesn't value talent at low levels [1], in which case you'll never get top compensation.

[1] http://www.dustingetz.com/the-unnecessity-of-superstar-middl...
When the Best is Mediocre
I'm sorry for the circumstances, it should work now.
At least one of them :)
Can someone explain what the benefits of the case are in your pocket? In his video, it's like the main focus. Can't it still fly out if you're dancing just as easily as any other case?
I'm attempting to scan a site that is accessed via https but it seems to default to http.
Do you think stopping piracy of foreign IP is a big concern for the Chinese government? I don't think it's fair to say that this proves that censorship doesn't stop piracy, when that probably isn't a goal (my guess is the Chinese government would prefer piracy over buying licenses overseas).
Indeed. This is probably the best Kickstarter video I've ever seen.
We need to give our children the Internet Freedom to create their own future. If you disagree, you hate children's futures and should not be part of politics.
Linux Then and Now [infographic]
I also find something amiss. If apple did provide India with secret access to confidential goverment information, would that not clearly be a treasonous act? And would that not require the immediate arrest of any apple employ involved? Things may have changed but as far as I know treason is still a capitol offense. I find both the article and the discussion on slash dot very strange.
Introducing KISS-surveillance -- The dead simple surveillance solution
The video is good exercise in "You can't please everyone."

Comments here are about 50-50 "love the dance", "hate the dance", and with a sparser spattering of "cool" and "who cares" to the philosopher designation.

He doesn't need to win everyone, or even a significant percentage of the population. Attracting the 33% or so that like the dancing and aren't alienated by the philosopher tag gets him a large enough market.

Without the dancing philosopher, essentially no one would have heard of his product.
I dig his neverending questionnings and explicitness.
To whoever made this video:

1. Delete this video.
2. Make a video explaining, how it's designed, what is it good for, why it's useful, why should people buy it. Focus only in its visual design and its features. I want to see how does it look and what are the main features. Avoid all other things.
I wonder if he gave Rubinius a go before switching to C++. IANAGD, but i'm guessing some of it's features would benefit game engines: Tunable GC, profiling (http://rubini.us/doc/en/tools/profiler/), JIT/LLVM. It wouldn't solve the C extension problem (maybe FFI does?) or distribution though.
for what its worth, at my last company once a candidate passed phone screening we would tell them that the in-person interview would include a one-hour coding assignment, and that they should tell us their preferred language and (free) editor/ide and we'd set it up. we also provided full access to google, and the tasks were reasonably easy (e.g. print out numbers in a square spiral, implement a duplicate file finder, that sort of thing). a depressingly vast majority still couldn't do it; contrariwise the good ones would have just as happily done it all on a whiteboard.
"But it's in 240p! Nobody likes watching 240p videos. So I transcribed it."

I've watched and shared this video several times. The video is just fine in 240p. You miss out on Feynman's delivery and style when it you just read it as text.

I think it's from a BBC documentary; the other parts are on YouTube as well. The discussion about how humans model or understand really big/really small numbers is especially interesting.
I wasn't able to try yet because of the required file but it looks cool so far. So far I'd suggest letting people know they need to add the webcam file first. Or if that's already there make it more prominent as its not really obvious. I'm checking it out on my iPad, maybe the desktop version makes that point clearer.
If that's true, a hypothetical "Protect Children's Internet Future" act could trivially undo any anti-Internet law too.
Why is that depressing? If your company were going to make a political contribution, wouldn't you pick politicians whose record indicates they agree with your positions?
Well, I think Totem/VLC still have some issues with certain DVD menu constructs, so there's that.

Also, libdvdcss2 is illegal in many parts of the world, so the Fluendo DVD player is your only legal option. Sure you could install libdvdcss2 anyway, and the likelihood of you being hauled in front of a court for it is minimal, but it's nice to have a legitimate option.
This reminds me of the fixed point theorem. Take a sheet of paper, scrumple it however you choose without tearing it. Place it over an unscrumpled copy of the original, without going outside the edges.

Some point in the scrumpled version is exactly above its original position.
Google+ Hacker News Shared Circle
Great design and wonderful packaging and marketing. The video made me want one even though I was not in the market for such a device.
Ask HN: What equity stake is realistic as a technical co-founder?
I'm a designer and developer who has been approached by someone locally about being the technical co-founder for a web-based business. I get on really well with the guy, he seems to know what he's doing from a business point of view, and I think the business is potentially very profitable.

My question is this: as the person who is designing and building the site/application on which the entire business depends, what kind of equity stake is realistic to expect in return?
Not for me. Medicine has been in my mind ever since I made the mistake of going to the emergency room with a terrible cold when I was here as a student. I ended up paying $400 for 1 pill of codeine, waiting 2 hours and be seen by some intern. $400 in 1995 for a student who makes $6.50 in a university library part time -- is fucked up. I don't care how it is justified and explained. And that is just my experience. There are a lot worse. So I would have been railing about it anyway whether we had the debate or now. I have been mentioning that for years.
He did say that he didn't know anything about making kickstarter videos, so it's not like he fooled you into watching him dancing. And for what the product is I think I got the general idea, even with all the dancing.
Watch Video$$ Arkansas State vs Northern Illinois live stream online video.
Nice write up. I wrote my own 2d game engine in C++ a while back. Switching to Ruby was great, but I never made any games. I did make a couple of JavaScript HTML 5 games. But here again speed is a limitation, and so am looking into C (and eventually Objective C) to eventually do some iPhone game making. As great as it would be to make games soley with scripting/interpreted languages, I don't think we're there yet.
A small script to clone and update all your watched GitHub projects
That's really cool. For the heck of it I increased the actor count to 16 and CPU-usage stayed ~50% when running (Core i7, dual core w/hyper-threading). If you comment out the NSLog call, it spikes to ~280% CPU usage, as the overhead introduced by NSLog is likely slowing things down.
The definition of a "top-notch" programmer is about how competently he/she can write required programs, not about how "commonplace" among Valley programmers are his/her biographical details.

ADDENDUM - An example of your bullet points working just as badly more recently than 30 years ago:

Cevat Yerli when he started Crytek
Well you don't give them the entire codebase, you package the bug-that-was-fixed into a tiny example app. I think it probably goes without saying to exclude changes in business rules.

Is this not closer to the actual job than Pascal's Triangle?
Can anybody explain me how to make an apple pie from scratch?
Nothing! Just a blank page.
It's a ruby app, and uses curl on the server to make the request: https://github.com/defunkt/hurl/blob/master/app/app.rb
In addition, libdvdcss2 is in Medibuntu, and most casual users don't know how to enable another repository.

Companies and organizations that supply Ubuntu to schools and other large clients in the U.S. might also want to avoid any possible legal trouble. Result: thousands of Ubuntu boxes end up with a proprietary DVD player on it.
Apologies for skimming, but I didn't want to skip out on the conversation entirely....

I agree wholeheartedly about a balance between dependence and independence, and have posted on this subject before.

Stereotypes: roughly, that women are better at supporting/nurturing roles, are good with children and the infirm, are better at navigating the social world -- like knowing how to smooth ruffled feathers, etc.. Whereas men as more tone-deaf socially, but are better at raw intellectual or physical tasks -- "getting the job done". Which are the activities that, coincidentally, our culture also values more than "soft skills" (follow the money).

(Please note I am not saying these gender stereotypes are accurate or useful).

This is what I was hearing echoed in this: "She's my heart, my compass, and the sunshine keeping me where I need and want to be... even when my mighty intellect forgets to breath, feel, love, and live for a living."

See? You don't see "mighty" used to describe anything about women very often.

I hope I'm not coming across as judgmental, I'm just very wary of talking about groups in this way at all. It's not useful or factual to say that "women are men's superior in every way" -- if I were even in the business of saying which people are superior to which other people (I'm not) then I have to imagine it would be a big muddle of both genders.

We are first individuals, then we can be split up into groups by gender, origin, age... lots of factors, but we are individuals first.

So I still don't like talking about characteristics of "women" as a whole, as if they applied to all women (including specific, individual women you encounter in comment threads). It's not fair to the socially awkward, mighty-intellect women for one thing, and I don't think it's very helpful even to naturally warm and giving women either -- it praises them and limits them at the same time. If a person's gender gets credit for how wonderful they are, the individual doesn't.

It's better to praise the specific women in your life, I think. I seem to have ended up with most of my close friends being female, but that doesn't mean I like every woman I meet, or dislike every man. They're all individuals first, right? We're all better off working to avoid making assumptions based purely on something like gender, and simply dealing as much as possible with individuals.
I wonder if switching to JRuby wouldn't have solved some of his problems? I'd imagine that distribution is much easier on JRuby. I suppose the issue is with libraries, but I'm not familiar with the libraries he mentioned.
If you are interested in hiring Waterloo co-ops at your company, they intern in four month intervals year round: http://hire.uwaterloo.ca/
Can Watch with eBay improve the effectiveness of product placement?
You should update "Log" tab with "Scan Queued ETA: X" and/or "Scan Started". How long should it take to start scanning?
No, I didn't. I love the features Rubinius gives you, but Windows support still needs a lot of work, and if I'd dived in to help, I'll never ship the game.
http://todo.inatorapp.com - also work by jonocooper. One chrome app (over 1000 users), one ubuntu app (mac version in dev), three websites (though not all finished), doesn't seem like a bad effort for a high school student.
Pricing your Android app correctly to increase sales
Easy porting to iPhone in the future is another big plus I should have mentioned in the original post.
As a UW alumnus doing a full-time startup a few blocks from UW, I actually don't see much of this "vibrant start-up scene" happening.

This is entirely my fault, which leads me to the question I've been wondering about for a while now:

Where in town would I go to get hooked in?

VeloCity has always been on my radar, but their site is terribly uninformative and doesn't give much of a place to start.

I hang around the university quite a bit but this hasn't gotten me any leads, either.
Deep Brain Stimulation has the benefit of being more directed. An electrode is lowered into a part of the basal ganglia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_ganglia) and current pulses are used to activate neuron groups. Its not clear how it works, but it is certainly more directed than electro convulsive therapy.

But, it is true, we don't really know the long term effects. However, DBS for parkinson's has been a steady success, so we can hope.
Happy to see more people who care about security. We run a seemingly similar service, although I can't seem to get this one working. I'd definitely check out other ways of verifying the domain though, since this leaves all your customers open to the Google Hacking of searching for webscan.html for sites a hacker can toss through your system.

http://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Ask HN: Will crowd-source-coding work?
I just finished reading the Frustrated post by iamjonlee and have to agree that misery loves company! Look at all of the responses.
I feel jon's pain. Judging by the responses there seems to be many failures before reaching success.
So the message is persistence...

While I'm not ready to call my latest venture a failure by any means, it is much slower to pick up then I thought when I began coding it 8 months ago.

So as not to repeat the same rate of adoption I am doing things differently this time. I would like to get you involved from the start. The idea remains the same - a site for topic based discussions, but that's the only parameter.

Everything else is up to us as a community to decide. This is a chance to fix (or not include at all) the problems we see with other social communities. We have the ability to add features that "solve problems" instead of just looking cool. Essentially we will be crowd-source-coding a new site.

Interested in the project? Here is a bare bones prototype to get started.

http://launchpile.com/crowdsource/
Possibly, but I'm much more comfortable in C++ than Java. I also get a much easier route to iOS if I stick with C++.
I'm sorry if your scan might take a while, the machine just can't handle this amount of traffic.
Thanks: after three days I think it was the right call. I just found myself burning too much brain energy on things I didn't want to have to care about.
Here is a good guide for hiring UW co-ops: http://barbaramacdonald.ca/post/11153941771/how-to-hire-the-...

Written by my cofounder
Being acquired doesn't have to suck
Do they? I wouldn't know but I am more likely to believe they don't. They probably do the same thing as they do in Mexico, where in high school we have technical careers. Depending on the technical career" they teach C (C++?), Visual Basic* or Visual FoxPro* and how to diagnose and repair a PC among other things. But people that pass this subjects are no more hackers than people that pass algebra and calculus are mathematicians.

" Which depends on the high school you go to.
? I am not sure if C++ was available when I was in high school.
* This was some time ago when I was in high school, maybe they don't teach them anymore.
Noticed the site is super slow, if you need help hosting this just let me know.
Probably worth noting that if you don't care about the dongle form factor, you can buy (shipping) Android set-top-boxes now, for the same price as this device[1].

These devices aren't Google TV devices - they run Android 2.x (although I'd expect Android 4.0 on them soon), and they don't have the custom Google TV skin. None-the-less, they are good value if you know what you want.

[1] http://s.dealextreme.com/search/Android+PMP
So when in "facetime" mode:

http://sozolate.com/popsockets/Kickstarter%20Images/PopSocke...

The phone is actually stable, rather than teetering on the edge of rolling to one side or the other
I think the biggest mistake is you pursued a high risk startup relying on the first iteration to go smoothly without having a plan in case things did not go well.

It sounds like you're running out of money personally? You need to fix that first. Realize that you've shown you can build an iPhone application and try to leverage that into some work. Or try to get external funding for your idea.

I wouldn't give up on Grooovy but make sure you're not in a bad situation if it doesn't take off or it just takes longer than you think to get traction. It usually ends up taking longer than you think.

The only feedback I have for the idea itself is be very careful about what people say they want. They may be imagining a different execution, or they may like the idea but will never use it.
Clinical depression is not so rare (unfortunately) and I don't know if it is a speacial issue among people who do startups.

The treatment described here is for people who don't respond to cognitive and drug therapy.

My interest in this topic is also from a basic science aspect. I am very intrigued by the fact that stimulating a part of the brain thought to be responsible for selecting motor acts can result in alleviation of something as complicated and "cognitive" as depression.
Speaking as a huge fan of Ruby, I think it's absolutely the wrong language to write games in, because games are enormously sensitive to runtime fluctuations, and as you found out, Ruby has them. In particular, a stop-the-world GC is just never going to give you satisfactory performance, unless every GC pass happens in <1ms and never happens more than once per frame.

That said, you might consider Lua as a primary scripting engine for your game. It's got a lot of your standard scripting language perks, but it's also obnoxiously fast and has an incremental garbage collector. Furthermore, there's no GIL, and it's designed to be embeddable, making it a very powerful choice for game development.